The Healing Power Implanted Within the Body—How to Be Germ-Proof—Digestive Disinfectants
WHEN an epidemic of grippe is raging in a neighborhood, why does not every one take the disease? And why do some die, while others recover? Why is it that some who are careful about their health are semi-invalids, while others who are careless have good health? In the providence of God, extensive medical research now enables us to furnish at least partial answer to each of these interesting questions.
THE REMARKABLE MYSTERY OF HEALTH
Nothing else seems so remarkable to me as the mystery of health and healing, except the amazing miracle of salvation. I knew a man who was a born thief. He was an expert pickpocket at the age of ten years. Finally he became the best known and most dreaded safe breaker in the United States.
Yet after he had served time in seven different state prisons, he "happened" to drop into a little mission in Chicago, and something "happened" to him that night. Then he began work washing windows at a dollar a day, and was ever after that an honest man. During the years that followed, he earned the complete confidence and respect of leading business men in Chicago, and was used of God for the saving of hundreds of souls.
THE LANGUID EYE TO FLASH WITH ANIMATION
Such a change is the most remarkable thing I know of. But to see the glow of health return to a face marked for the tomb, to see the languid eye again flash with animation and new life, is almost as inspiring. This is a sight that fills my soul with a peculiar holy awe, even after all these years of medical experience.
Thirty centuries ago the inspired psalmist said that the same God who forgave iniquities healed all diseases. Ps. 103:3. Disease was formerly considered to be something that could be driven out of a man as we drive a cat out of a room. The heathen tried to dislodge it by burning the patient with hot irons, while the doctors in civilized lands attempted to do the same by administering nauseating medicines.
IN SPITE OF THE OLD-TIME DOCTOR
We are gradually learning that the disease symptoms are in reality the efforts of the body to repair itself. Hence when the old-fashioned doctor gave medicines merely to smother the symptoms, he was working squarely against the patient’s interests. If the patient recovered, it was often in spite of the doctor and his medicines.
We now know that the healing power is within the patient, and not in the doctor’s bottle or in the nurse’s applications, and that it is the business of the scientific physician and the attendants to cooperate intelligently with and direct these healing activities, which they may hinder but which they never can create. The farmer can cultivate corn, but he can not grow corn.
A perfectly healthy body is the best protection against disease germs. We are naturally endowed with a certain amount of vitality, or natural resistance, or "something" that wards off disease. The ancients used to call it "the power in nature that cures." This mysterious something came from God, and it can not be put up in bottles nor sold over the counter.
Rockefeller’s son will probably inherit so much money when his father dies that he will be unable to spend it in one lifetime. And some men naturally inherit so much of this vital resistance that they can not squander it all during their lifetime; while others inherit so little that they always have to live from hand to mouth, so to speak, and are constantly running the risk of contracting disease.
AN AUTOMATIC AIR STERILIZER
There is something bitter in every orange rind. It is put there by nature to discourage the parasites from burrowing into the orange. Likewise God has put "something" into every healthy person that renders him unattractive to germs. Before we contract any acute disease, we must generally spend weeks, months, or even years battering down one bodily defense after another, until it becomes just as easy for the germs to waylay us as it finally was for the Japanese to enter Port Arthur.
Walking down the crowded thoroughfare of a large city on any windy day, every breath we inhale contains pneumonia germs, perhaps grippe germs, and more than likely tubercular bacilli. But when a healthy person exhales this air, it has been sterilized. The microbes have been destroyed.
A DISINFECTANT KILLS THE GERMS
The healthy mucus in the nose, throat, and bronchial tubes of the lungs contains a disinfectant that kills these germs. Before we contract any respiratory disease, we must have lowered the vital resistance of the body; for only healthy blood can make healthy mucus.
When suffering of colds, bronchitis, or other respiratory disease, it is not enough to inhale medicated steam to kill the germs. We must reform—in other words, repent, for there is such a thing as physical repentance.
The man who drinks liquor must reform. The tobacco user must cease that filthy habit. Those who are eating abominable stuff, or even good food at irregular hours, must cease to do evil, and learn to do well. There is too much physical repentance that is scarcely skin deep, and that is why so many of our fellow men do not live out half their days.
A DIGESTIVE DISINFECTANT
Some years ago a French investigator fed a dog a piece of rotten meat. An hour later he killed the dog, opened its stomach, and found that the gastric juice had disinfected the rotten meat.
If the human stomach were not to a certain extent similarly endowed, there would be many more cases of ptomain poisoning. The gastric juice, as well as the other digestive juices, protects us against disease.
The mucous membrane of the intestines has a similar power to destroy poisons. It is a well-known fact that a very small quantity of rattlesnake poison introduced through the skin directly into the blood may cause death, while a considerable quantity may be swallowed with safety. The same is true of other poisons. This explains why it is possible for some people year after year to eat with comparative safety unwholesome and wretched foods that happen to tickle their perverted appetite.
AN IMPORTANT RENOVATING PLANT
The great mission of the liver, besides making bile, is to stand between us and destruction. Practically all the digested food products pass through the liver before they are permitted to enter the general blood stream. It holds back, changes, and destroys poisons, and thus for years prevents well-earned pains, aches, and untimely death.
THE LIVER DESTROYED THE POISON
An experimenter injected nicotin, the poison of tobacco, into the vein entering the liver, and he found that nearly half of it was destroyed in passing through that organ.
There are some men who have inherited an almost unlimited liver capacity for destroying poisons. This permits them to use tobacco year after year without any apparent15serious consequences. But they are simply presuming on nature, without knowing when the liver and other bodily defenses will give way and overwhelm the system with toxins. It is a terrible price to pay for a little temporary unearned felicity.
SUGGESTIONS TO TOBACCO USERS
The use of tobacco does no one any good. It is certain to do some harm, and it may do a vast amount of unconscious harm. I advise every tobacco user to ask the Lord to deliver him from this wretched bondage. For a few days, live exclusively on a fruit diet, eating it in abundance three or four times a day. Drink a large amount of water. If convenient, take one or two sweat baths. It is surprising how easily freedom from the habit is secured.
Experiments have been made on dogs, connecting the blood-vessel that goes to the liver directly with the one that leaves it. It was found then that if the dog was fed on meat, he would sicken and die in a few days; but when fed on bread and milk, he could live satisfactorily for months. This experiment gives us a hint as to how highly essential for our welfare the liver is when eating freely of flesh foods.
The liver is also overtaxed when fried foods are eaten, and when compelled to destroy pepper and other fiery spices; and above all things, when it has to contend constantly with poisonous alcoholic liquors.
"THE reason some men can not make both ends meet is because they are too busily making one end drunk."
