Advantages of Temperance.
SOLOMON tells us that the glutton shall come to poverty; warns us not to be among riotous eaters of flesh, and even bids us to put a knife to our throats if we be men given to appetite. Is there no less desperate remedy? Lord Byron once told a companion that if some demigod would indicate to us how much we ought to eat, it would put an end to half the miseries of the race. Jonathan Edwards we see noting in his diary: "I find that I cannot be convinced in the time of eating, that to eat more would be to exceed the bounds of temperance, though I have had two years' experience of the like, and yet three minutes after I have done, I am convinced of it. But yet again I overeat myself, thinking I should be somewhat faint if I leave off then; but when I have finished, I am convinced of excess—and so it is from time to time. I have observed the more it seems to be the truth, when it is according to my inclination, than when otherwise." Jefferson says that "no man ever repeats eating too little." Sir Isaac Newton often dined on a penny's worth of bread. Abernethy cured his indigestion and regained his flesh by "going into the country, where he could get good milk and eggs, and living upon three ounces of baked custard taken three times a day, with no drink but ginger-water. On this quantity of food he regained his flesh and uniformly got better." Marion and his men waxed strong and valiant with no food but sweet potatoes, no drink but water, and no shelter but the sky. "Besides brown bread, the Greek boatmen subsist almost solely on their native fruits, figs, grapes, and raisins. They are the most nimble, active, graceful, cheerful, and even merry people in the world." 103Grant Thorburn attributes his cheerful old age to the fact that he, “never eats enough,” and thousands of his countrymen are wearing out their bodies, not so much by the excess of business and multiplicity of cares, as by the overwork they crowd upon themselves in digesting surplus and unnecessary food.—Israelite.