p. 206 | Health a Duty by H. Mann

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 30, 1865

Health a Duty.

By H. Mann

WERE a young man to write down a list of his duties, health should be among the first items in the catalogue. This is no exaggeration of its value; for health is indispensable to almost every form of human enjoyment; it is the grand auxiliary of usefulness; and should a man love the Lord his God, with all his heart and soul and mind and strength, he would have ten times more heart and soul and mind and strength to love him with, in the vigor of health, than under the palsy of disease. Not only the amount, but the quality of the labor which a man can perform, depends upon his health. The work savors of the workman. If the poet sickens, his verse sickens; if black, venous blood flows to an author's brain, it beclouds his pages. Not only "lying lips," but a dyspeptic stomach, is an abomination to the Lord. At least in this life, so dependent is mind upon material organization,—the functions and manifestations of the mind upon the condition of the body it inhabits,—that the materialist hardly states practical results too strongly, when he affirms that thought and passion, wit, imagination and love, are only emanations from exquisitely organized matter, just as perfume is the influence of flowers, or music the ethereal product of an Æolian harp.—H. Mann.