SOWING FOR PHYSICAL AND SPIRITUAL HEALTH by David Paulson; W. S. Sadler

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Aug 14, 1900

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 77, No. 33.

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SOWING FOR PHYSICAL AND SPIRITUAL HEALTH

By David Paulson; W. S. Sadler

David Paulson ✠ W. S. Sadler

STRUCTURE BUILDERS, OR THE PROTEIDS.

(Continued.)

RHEUMATISM AND BRIGHT'S DISEASE.

When uric acid and similar poisons are allowed to accumulate in the system, either from wrong habits of eating or from lack of physical exercise, the various tissue cells will become so anaesthetized, or chloroformed, that they will not recognize nor utilize the digested proteids that are brought to them by the circulation of the blood, and so they will gradually accumulate in the system, and must be carried off by the kidneys in the form of albumen. Such a patient is then said to be in the first stages of Bright's disease. If this condition is allowed to continue, it will be only a question of time when there will be a real structural change in the kidneys, and a practically incurable condition will be produced. Or perhaps before it has reached such a stage, nature will try to relieve the blood of a portion of this accumulation by depositing some of it as waste products in the various joints of the body; and, as a result, the person thus afflicted may suffer with a severe attack of rheumatism, which, after all, is a protective process by which nature tries to save from serious injury the vital tissues of the body.

SPIRITUAL LESSONS SUGGESTED BY BRIGHT'S DISEASE.

In our spiritual experience we can get into that condition where the Bible doctrines, the great fundamental truths of the Bible, which are the spiritual structure builders of the soul, are received into the moral being only to be passed on to others in the same form in which they were received,—without having become a real part of our Christian experience. In other words, just as in Bright's disease the proteid elements are eliminated without having first become a part of the body, so doctrines may be learned simply as a theory, and as such given to others; but just as Bright's disease results in rapid emaciation physically, so those who fail to make Bible truths and doctrines a part of their real experience have nothing to look forward to but leanness of soul.

As scientific authorities affirm, the proteids are not only pre-eminently the physical structure builders, but they also to a certain extent are converted into bodily heat and energy; and so with the Bible doctrines; while they are pre-eminently the great moral structure builders, they, too, may be made to furnish the growing Christian experience with a certain amount of spiritual fervor and moral energy. Bible truths and doctrines, unmixed with faith, become a source of stumbling and offense to the soul, just as the physical proteids taken into the stomach would only serve to produce disease if they were unacted upon by the physical digestive agents. Faith, being the great spiritual digestive agent, must be mingled with all our spiritual food in order to enable us properly to extract from it the real nourishment there is in it for us. By faith we must be able to receive not only the doctrines, but all things in divine revelation, so as to secure from them the real life of God.

A weakness of many well-meant efforts to reach souls, is the tendency to deal with them on an argumentative plane, seeking to prove everything by cold intellectual arguments. But instead let the fires of the soul be kindled, and its tissues cleansed. The spiritual food should be carefully examined to see if it is well proportioned,—if it contains the proper proportions of promise, precept, and prayer, as well as the strong meat of spiritual tissue builders. But, above all, see that faith is thoroughly mixed with every truth and doctrine that enters the soul, and this will serve as a sure safeguard against its being given out to others as a formal truth. Having become a part of you, it will be a thing given to others through your life, as a result of your life, instead of being brought to them merely as a theory, as a deduction or conclusion of the mind. Theory is but an ingenious apology for the absence of practice.

WHAT IS SPIRITUAL RHEUMATISM?

“For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine [“hear thy teaching,” Rotherham].” 2 Tim. 4:3. The world to-day is looking for things that are diseased and dying. Human appetite has become so perverted that it delights to feast upon the carcasses of dead animals, and along with this more or less diseased food the consumer must take into his system the many poisonous waste products that have accumulated in the animal's body, and this but serves to excite and stimulate the mind and body. And so in the spiritual world, the time has come when even many professed Christians will not endure sound, wholesome, living, moral food. Plain, vital, unadulterated truth, fresh from the word of God, does not serve to satisfy their perverted moral appetites; and just as their physical systems clamor for diseased meat, so they clamor for diseased spiritual meat,—diseased doctrines. Much of the food eaten to-day is diseased, and the greater part of the so-called Bible teaching received by the souls of many professed Christians is highly diseased. It is sick: yes, “sick nigh unto death.”

One of the danger signals of the harmfulness of error and perverted truth might properly be termed “spiritual rheumatism.” Error received on any particular point, or in any particular phase of our Christian experience, soon indicates its presence by symptoms of spiritual lameness and moral weakness. The soul loses its freedom of movement, and when it seeks to engage in spiritual activity, finds the same to be a most painful proceeding, even as the rheumatic finds pain, and only pain, when he is forced to move the ailing member. And as the rheumatic avoids physical activity, just so the man who has imbibed error from without, or who has perverted truth within, carefully avoids occasions of spiritual activity and Christian work. Spiritual exercises, from public worship down to those of private devotion, become more and more painful, unattractive,

and undesirable to such a one, whose being has become saturated and permeated with the moral poisons of erroneous principles and perverted truth. Many professed Christians who for many years have had much light and great truth, go hobbling along on moral crutches, as it were, weak and lame in their spiritual joints, owing to the accumulation of moral poison in the soul.

TREATMENT FOR SPIRITUAL RHEUMATISM.

Let the fires of God burn in the soul. “Quench not the Spirit.” Give over all to the purifying, refining, and cleansing process of the Spirit of God within. Make diligent effort to discover every source of pollution from without. Let there be a moral house cleaning. Consecrate the whole being, every part of it, to the practice of truth eternal. Submit the soul as a burnt offering to God. Consecrate body, soul, and spirit to the work of receiving and living out truth. Sincere, firm decision, coupled with the divine power of an infinite God, will suffice to cleanse the moral being from every source of defilement, and to present it free from all spiritual disease, as a fit temple in which God may dwell, and work to his own name's honor and glory.

THE PEPSIN FAD, OR THE DELUSION OF DIGESTIVE SUBSTITUTES.

It has been erroneously supposed that all digestive disturbances are more or less due to a deficiency of pepsin. Careful observations, made in thousands of cases where the contents of the stomach have been chemically analyzed, have, however, demonstrated that digestive disorders are more frequently due to a deficiency of hydrochloric acid, or to an excess of the same, or to a failure of proper starch digestion. Yet in spite of this fact, the stomachs of pigs are annually robbed of tons and tons of pepsin, to be taken into human stomachs.

It is a widespread error that man may go on in wrong dietetic habits, and so wear out and squander his normal digestive fluids, and then in some way atone for this physical transgression by merely adding, to his daily food, pepsin or some other artificial digestive agent. And striking as well as costly advertisements proclaiming that if certain digestive tablets are eaten, then the fortunate user may eat whatever he likes, are to be seen displayed in almost any drug-store window as well as in the advertising columns of the daily papers and popular magazines. It is true that these do sometimes afford temporary aid; but their use is deceptive, in that they often lead the victims of digestive trouble to suppose they are being cured, when in reality they are being carried onward to a point in their disease where even the most rational remedies and the most careful reform may perhaps be of little or no avail to them. In other words, they have apparently sinned away their days of dietetic grace, deluded by the idea that in some way they were deceiving nature, while all the time she was keeping an unerring account with them.

SPIRITUAL SUBSTITUTION—A LESSON DRAWN FROM DIGESTIVE SUBSTITUTION.

The colossal mistake of believing that pepsin, extracted from the stomach of an inferior animal, can digest food in the human stomach, has a most striking parallel in the religious world to-day. It is a small matter with many professed Christians whether or not their truth comes straight from heaven in the divine channel and in the divine order. That which God designed they should do for themselves in digesting, understanding, appreciating, and appropriating the divine principles found in the Bible, they, like those who are willing to have artificial pepsin digest their proteids, are quite willing to avoid; and then to supply the lack by having the Bible, and the way of truth in general, interpreted, explained, and perverted, by almost anyone who, like the pepsin vender, will be audacious enough to claim the power to do this work for them.

The entire philosophy of spiritual substitution, as well as physical, is wrong. This is illustrated in the erroneous teachings of the mass; in their dependence upon either the righteousness or the prayers of others for spiritual and physical salvation; and even in their dependence upon a minister to select, masticate, and digest that spiritual food which God has arranged that the soul must extract and appropriate for itself. The great policy of the archdeceiver is not always to lead man to ignore his need of moral food, but rather to lay careful plans not only to contaminate his moral food supply, but to pervert even the channel through which it should be communicated to, and appropriated by, the soul.