Gut

“ If we get into the habit of thinking evil thoughts, we live in that atmosphere. Health is a habit, so also is success. Honesty, virtue, vice, procrastination, contentment, fault-finding, grumbling, candy eating, gossiping, drinking, sleeping, religion, friends, life itself, are habits. Life is what we make it. "As the man thinketh in his heart, so he is." ”

“ Yes, my lord; and I am sure you will be faithful, because you live alone, without family, and, by condition as well as character, you have not, like so many others, all sorts of inclinations which always bore or annoy one; as a serious and convinced man, you have only one passion, but profound, absolute, and that is gluttony. Well, this passion, I offer, my lord, to satisfy, as you have never been satisfied in your life. ”

“ All these things, I say, are in the mind. But I would have you consider also the limbs and the senses, which, like the other parts of the body, will appear to you to be not only the companions of the virtues, but also their slaves. What will you say, if many things in the body itself appear to deserve to be preferred to pleasure? such as strength, health, activity, beauty? ”

“ The Will.—A firm determination must be formed to lead a life of purity; to quickly quench the first suggestions of impurity; to harbor no unchaste desire; to purge the mind of carnal thoughts; in short, to cleave fast to mental continence. Each triumph over vicious thoughts will strengthen virtue; each victory won will make the next the easier. So strong a habit of continence may be formed that this alone will be a bulwark against vice.
Diet.—He who would keep in subjection his animal nature must carefully guard the portal to his stomach. The blood is made of what is eaten. ”

“ Oh, how much
does health seem the more pleasant to me, after a sickness so near and so
contiguous, that I can distinguish them in the presence of one another,
in their greatest show; when they appear in emulation, as if to make head
against and dispute it with one another! As the Stoics say that vices
are profitably introduced to give value to and to set off virtue, we can,
with better reason and less temerity of conjecture, say that nature has
given us pain for the honour and service of pleasure and indolence. ”

“ I conceive, therefore, that when God did enlarge the universal diet of man's body, saving ever the rules of temperance, he then also, as before, left arbitrary the dieting and repasting of our minds; as wherein every mature man might have to exercise his own leading capacity.
How great a virtue is temperance, how much of moment through the whole life of man! ”

“ The health of the body was too nearly allied to the health of the soul; and could a greater benefit, a greater mercy, be shown towards others than by appropriating to one's self a remedy by which so many sufferings could be assuaged, so many a danger averted? ”

“ For just as the body absorbs things of all kinds, things common and unclean no less than those that the priest or a vision has cleansed, and converts them into swiftness or strength, into the play of beautiful muscles and the moulding of fair flesh, into the curves and colours of the hair, the lips, the eye; so the soul in its turn has its nutritive functions also, and can transform into noble moods of thought and passions of high import what in itself is base, cruel and degrading ”

“ If evil, why? If good, am I radiating as much as I might and should?"
For myself I want every man and woman I meet or shake hands with, to feel that I am physically strong, healthy, and vigorous; that I have vigor and health of mind; that I think for myself, rather than accept the opinions of others, and that in character, in spirit, in soul, I am healthy, vigorous, sincere, pure, true; that my emotions, my aspirations, my ambitions are noble and upward. I want to radiate spiritual health. ”

“ If it is your desire that your circulatory, respiratory, and digestive functions, should be discharged properly, normally, if you want your appetite to be good, your sleep sound, your humor equable, avoid all emotions that are over-strong, all pleasures that are too intense, and meet the inevitable sorrows and the cruel agonies of life with a resigned and firm soul. Ever have some occupation to employ and divert your mind, and to make it proof against the temptations of want or of desire. ”

“ Thus the poor body, subject to these revulsions of unnatural action in overwork and stimulation and sedation, is goaded to abnormities and unnatural action, sending up to the soul no other influences but those which drive it to moral madness and vicious deeds.
Now, vice is a morbid exhibition of the will. The will is represented through the physical organ, the brain, and the brain is straightway affected by the condition of the body and the state of the blood. The will is that power of the mind by which we put forth volitions and perform actions. ”

“ I and my infirmity are left exposed and bare to the broad, unwinking eye of the world, which nothing can elude. My meals are scanned, my mouthfuls weighed in a balance; that which appetite demands is set down to the account of gluttony—a sin which my whole soul abhors—nay, which Nature herself has put it out of my power to commit. ”

“ Our character is refined to pure gold. The gross lusts of the flesh, the commonness which is in all of us, the pettiness of spirit, disappear in these profitable afflictions. From a bed of sickness may spring the most delicate flowers of unselfishness, of devotion, and of true saintliness. ”

“ And while we do want to eat,–think the old destructive thoughts, we want a thousands times more than all else, the new freedom of the body, mind and spirit, and the possession of the dear desires of our soul. ”

“ A VINDICATION OF NATURAL DIET.
I hold that the depravity of the physical and moral nature of man originated in his unnatural habits of life. The origin of man, like that of the universe of which he is a part, is enveloped in impenetrable mystery. ”

“ It has been observ'd, in treating of the passions, that pride and humility, love and hatred, are excited by any advantage or disadvantages of the mind, body, or fortune; and that these advantages or disadvantages have that effect, by producing a separate impression of pain or pleasure. The pain or pleasure, which arises from the general survey or view of any action or quality of the mind, constitutes its vice or virtue, and gives rise to our approbation or blame, which is nothing but a fainter and more imperceptible love or hatred. ”

“ In this way, recognize those in the first place so that you may understand vices themselves as if are were certain sicknesses of the soul, or wounds of the inner person. The very person, indeed, is like a patient, and God the physician. The gifts of the Holy Spirit are the remedy. The virtues are healthiness. The beatitudes are the joy of happiness. There are, accordingly, seven capital or principal vices, and from these rise all evils. ”

“ If it were possible to bring the soul into view, and to behold it with our bodily eyes, that of the luxurious would seem depressed, mournful, miserable, and wasted with leanness, for the more the body grows sleek and gross, the more lean and weakly is the soul. ”

“ But, alas! my good Friend, we live, it is to be feared, in an age when the pleasure, resulting from the exercise of the bodily organs of taste, has acquired a terrible and destructive ascendancy over the real benefits and uses, both natural and spiritual, both temporal and eternal, which they were intended to confer and yield. For how few, at this day, in that exercise, look through the pleasure to the use and benefit! ”

“ But he can either deliberately will, as his action’s object, that pleasure which is thus inevitably incident to the act, and the more he does so, the more simply greedy and sensual he will become; or he can directly will, as his determining end, that sustenance of life and strength for his work and spiritual growth, which is the justification and ultimate reason of eating (the rationale of that very pleasure so wisely attached by nature, as a stimulus, to a process so necessary to the very highest objects) , and the more he does so, the more manly and spiritual he will grow. ”

“ Let us openly and boldly vindicate our teaching. We are sure that they ‘who are in the flesh cannot please God.’ [61] Not, surely, meaning ‘in the covering or substance of the flesh,’ but in the care, the affection, the desire for it. As for us, less grossness (macies) of the body is no cause of regret, for neither does God give flesh by weight any more than he gives spirit by measure.... ”

“ I would teach them that bad food, bad drink, or bad air makes bad blood; that bad blood makes bad tissue, and bad flesh bad morals. I would teach them that healthy thoughts are as essential to healthy bodies as pure thoughts to a clean life. ”

“ Nothing puts us out of countenance [δυσωπεῖ] , not the charming beauty of their form, not the plaintive sweetness of their voice or cry, not their mental intelligence [πανουργία ψυχῆς] , not the purity of their diet, not superiority of understanding. For the sake of a part of their flesh only, we deprive them of the glorious light of the sun—of the life for which they were born. The plaintive cries they utter we affect to take to be meaningless ”

“ A healthy condition of the sensations depends on the limbs of the body; as, for instance, when one sees with one’s eyes, and hears with one’s ears, and smells with one’s nose, and feels with one’s body, just what one ought to see, and hear, and smell, and feel. Such a condition as this is a healthy condition. And good fortune is when a man does rightly and successfully what a good and energetic man ought to do. ”

“ On a line with common form and common sense I place common ease of body and of mind: unfelt health, unfelt good, or that arising to the degree of satisfaction and content; in fine, whatever we call commonly good, and requisite for the well-being of humanity. ”

“ There being then such an intimate connexion between the mind and body, and so many thousands of ways in which one alternately acts upon, and effects the other, and brings millions to an untimely grave, we see at once the propriety of not only guarding our health by temperance in eating and drinking, but more particularly by avoiding troubles of a mental character. ”

“ We need scarcely refer to the moral as well as the physical beauty of cleanliness—cleanliness which indicates self-respect, and is the root of many fine virtues—and especially of purity, delicacy, and decency. We might even go farther, and say that purity of thought and feeling result from habitual purity of body. For the mind and heart of man are, to a very great extent, influenced by external conditions and circumstances ”

“ It will follow from this that the best taste is that which prefers wholesome food, and that by cultivating a preference for wholesome and nutritious things I shall be training my palate in the way it should go. In just the same way our question about the best conscience will resolve itself into a question about the purpose or function of the conscience—why we have got it, and what it is good for. ”

“ Bread is bread, and blood is blood, and they say, “how can this man give us his flesh to eat?” They do not understand that Wisdom is a body and opinion a shadow. The natural man's belief is his body, and to eat and drink the world's wisdom is to eat condemnation or disease.
Now I will illustrate a cure. I sit down by a sick person and you also sit down, I feel her trouble and the state of her mind, and find her faint and weary for the want of wisdom. I tell her what she calls this feeling that troubles her, and knowing her trouble my words contain food that you know not of. ”

“ And as the bilious and more saturnine passions, by creating disorders in the blood and humours, have as bad an influence, I see, upon the body politick as body natural—and as nothing but a habit of virtue can fully govern those passions, and subject them to reason—I should add to my prayer—that God would give my subjects grace to be as wise as they were merry ”

“ Hence, instead of saying of a man—"He has a good heart"—should not the dictum be rather—"He is the happy possessor of an excellent stomach regularly and adequately filled?" For truly how many actions, evil and good, may be directly traced to the influence of this most important organ! ”

“ And a like confusion happens with pleasure and pain, and with many other things. The man who compares grey with black, calls grey white; and the man who compares absence of pain with pain, calls the absence of pain pleasure. Again, hunger and thirst are inanitions of the body, ignorance and folly of the soul; and food is the satisfaction of the one, knowledge of the other. ”

“ The inferior powers pertaining to the sensitive appetite have a natural capacity to be obedient to reason; but not the bodily powers, nor those of the bodily humors, nor those of the vegetative soul, as is made plain Ethic. i, 13. And hence perfection of virtue, which is in accordance with right reason, does not exclude passibility of body; yet it excludes the fomes of sin, the nature of which consists in the resistance of the sensitive appetite to reason.
Reply Obj. 2: The flesh naturally seeks what is pleasing to it by the concupiscence of the sensitive appetite ”

“ But, behold the danger of doing violence to the order of GOD and heaven, by suffering bodily appetites, and especially the taste for bodily food, to exalt themselves above heavenly affections, and that taste for heavenly food which the ALMIGHTY, in His mercy and wisdom, hath been pleased to implant in every human mind! ”

“ Sickness, as well as sin, is a moral weakness, temptation, and fall, — a loss of that control over the body that the apostle said to exercise “is our only reasonable service.” Let the slave to a wrong desire learn the science of being, and he becomes the master of that desire, and ascends somewhat higher continually the scale of health, happiness, and Life. ”