RELATION BETWEEN CAUSE AND EFFECT.
By David Paulson, M.D.
WHEN chloroform is administered to a person he is not to blame for struggling and saying foolish and unwise sayings. Yet the eating of improper food or even good food in wrong combinations ferments and creates poisons that are taken up by the blood and carried to the brain and result in disorder. Then some of these people wonder why it is that they feel so harsh and unkind toward their neighbors, and why they do not experience a deeper work of grace in their hearts. If they would change their diet to that of a simple, healthy, and pure one, how different they would feel! God's law established the connection between cause and its effect,—God Himself has arranged these conditions. And we can pick off the leaves of a plant or tree, but if the roots are left, it will grow again and put out more leaves. Highly-spiced foods create the thirst which is a cause of drunkenness. And many are today laboring for temperance reform while their cooks are at home making drunkards out of their sons. People only see the outward, the superficial, for when a man is taken sick the first thing he wants to do is to get rid of the annoying symptoms. But they are only danger signals to him. We must deal with the cause. When a man comes to us in either spiritual or physical trouble, are we simply to say, "Peace, peace," to him, when God says there is no peace to him while he persists in doing the very thing that brought him into trouble? God wants us to go back to the cause. God wants us to lay the ax at the root of the tree. It is the cause that is wrong; the effect is right, for it is ordained by God Himself. I sometimes think Satan knows a great deal more about physiology than we do, for all the great poison habits that he has led the people into, such as morphine, liquor, tobacco, tea, and coffee using, blunt the mind, by which we recognize God. And yet there are many who study these things and labor hard to in some way excuse them when used "moderately." We might as well talk of moderate stealing, moderate swearing, for an evil can not be indulged in at all and be excused. Sin and righteousness do not come from the same root. Now if there was a cruel person in a high building who would throw an infant out of the window, the law of effect says that it would be crushed. Some one might pick up the infant and bind up the wounds, and thus be doing a noble work, yet they would only be remedying the effect. Those in the building might keep throwing others out, and hundreds on the sidewalk might keep trying to remedy the effect, but would it not be far better for some one to go up into the building and stop these wicked people from throwing them out? This would be getting at the cause. Nearly half the children die before the age of five, murdered in the majority of cases by operating causes that ought to be just as apparent as the one in the foregoing illustration. Several years ago 100 infants died weekly during winter in Brooklyn, but during summer 600 died per week. Was this a "mysterious dispensation of Providence," operating six times stronger in the summer than in the winter, or were the infants being thrown out and crushed, as in the illustration, by sour feeding-bottles, back-yard odors, defective plumbing, decayed fruit, and poisonous beef tea, the majority of these causes acting more virulent in hot weather than in cold? So many are spending all their energies trying to remedy the effect and paying little or no attention to the cause! If I put my hand on a hot stove, God has arranged the law of effect that my hand shall be burned. Now if I should inject some cocaine into my hand to remove the painful effect and still keep my hand on the stove, would that be the thing to do?—No, I should remove the cause, that is, remove my hand from the stove. So simply doping with headache powders to smother the sad reminder of a wretched dinner, merely rubbing liniments on a painful rheumatic joint to get rid of the pain, does not prevent more of the poisons from those habitual beefsteak breakfasts to lodge there. We have not helped the world out of its troubles until we can apply the remedy to the causes of its misery.