POINTED PARAGRAPHS ON HEALTH.
Fiery spices create a thirst that the town pump can not supply; thus the kitchen becomes a vestibule to the public house, and the cook goes in partnership with the undertaker. The man who is cultivating wrong physical habits is in that very process sending out invitation cards for disease to call upon him, and it certainly would be remarkable if some disease did not accept his invitation. Just as watermelons often grow as large in poor soil as in good, so a man may, while living on totally unsuitable diet, develop an apparently good physique, but, as in the case of the watermelon, there will be an inferior flavor about his moral and spiritual nature. The faith which appropriates physical righteousness, instead of being an opiate leading a man to indifference concerning his physical habits, acts as a stimulant and tonic, and prompts him to the highest and most complete obedience to physical law. Would you not be very much surprised to find a boy going to bed at night ignorant and waking up in the morning as a college professor? It is likewise inconsistent to entertain the notion that there is some way in which humanity can secure health without sowing for it. Thousands of persons are sowing for the thorns and thistles of ill health. Because they do not have a bountiful harvest of disease the next day, they foolishly imagine that transgression does not hurt them. Men go on using liquor, tobacco, and fiery condiments, which blister the inside of their stomachs even more successfully than if they were put on the outside. They bury the carcasses of dead animals in their stomachs instead of in the graveyard. Others overeat, and neglect necessary ventilation in their rooms, and even speculate on how soon automobiles will become cheap enough to enable them to dodge the blessing of taking exercise; and then, because they do not become physical wrecks at once, as a result of all these vicious habits, it is hard to impress them with the fact that they are doing themselves any harm.