Moral health

“ Just as the health of the animal soul consists in the equilibrium of its component parts, and this equilibrium is restored, when impaired, by appropriate medicine, so the health of the human soul consists in a moral equilibrium which is maintained and repaired, when needful, by ethical instruction and moral precepts. ”

“ Does it need to be said that any genuine ethical doctrine, while it will listen to and not despise the lesson of physiology and the cultus of serenity, will regard both the one and the other as utterly subordinate considerations in relation to the moral ideal? As it may be right to lay down the life for others, so it may be right to endanger health, to draw too heavily on the supplies of nervous tissue, to face the possibility of a sacrifice of intellectual calm, in a word to run counter to the admonitions both of physiology and of culture. ”

“ The basis of all good citizenship is physical and moral health. Health is really wholeness, and so we get the word holiness, for all these words are products of the same idea. What service to the race can be greater, both in its present value and its ultimate effect, than to produce men and women both physically and morally whole? It is no doubt a duty to do all we can to help the unfit, and assist the infirm ”

“ Why not pay careful attention to man in all his elements of strength, physical, mental, and moral? Why not make personal purity a fixed principle in the manhood of the present and coming generations, and thus insure the best men the world has ever seen? ”

“ Numerous cases of a like nature come under his observation almost daily. Shall we be told that it is immoral and unbecoming for the physician to provide a remedy for cases of this description? Will any pretend that the delicacy of the subject should prevent us from directing the proper course to be pursued to insure health and happiness? Away with such mockery—let us speak plainly upon all subjects that equally concern the health and happiness of our fellow beings. ”

“ Let us make Health the great civic virtue, and Disease, as well as unsanitary and unhygienic conditions, the crime. Our so-called crimes of theft, murder, forgery, etc., should be treated as weaknesses and faults to be corrected by Moral Rectifiers—by the preachers, priests, rabbis, and ethical culturists. Consider how much is implied in developing and breeding a race of healthy men and women. All relations of life would feel the vital change at once, and moral weaknesses would disappear. ”

“ Although it is evident to my mind that the world is growing more healthy and more moral with every generation—speaking of civilized nations—it is still, as all agree, in a most pitiful state as regards both moral and physical health. ”

“ To sum up, we credit these little ones with a simplicity of moral organization which forbids us to believe that the causes which are active for mischief in their elders are not as potent for evil in them. The popular and reasonable creed of moral education, which teaches us to ask from a well child self-control, self-restraint, truth of statement, reasonable endurance of the unavoidable, good temper, is not too lightly or too entirely to be laid aside when sickness softens the rule of health and all our hearts go out in pity to the little sufferer. ”

“ Could we not keep ourselves from being cheated out of our health and happiness, and also do something to put an end to physical, intellectual and moral deterioration which threatens so many families and even races? ”

“ Hence the necessity of being right yourself, in order to teach this Science of Healing. You must utilize the might of Mind, and its moral power, in order to walk over the waves of error, and support your claims by demonstration. If lost yourself in the belief and fear of disease, and ignorant of the mental remedy, you fail to use the energies of Mind in your own behalf, you can exercise little or no power for others' help. ”

“ All these questions apply to the health of the nation and to what it shall be in the future. When we speak of the health of a nation, we are so given to thinking of the physical condition, only, of its citizens that the more comprehensive thought of their mental, moral, ethical and business health is likely to escape our minds. Indeed, I fancy that few persons realize that even in the matter of business ethics and general moral outlook (including the nation's political policy, of course) heredity cuts a very wide swath. ”

“ CASE I. HEALTH. Strange it is, that moral treatises, when professing to lay open the great edifice of human duties, and to expose its very foundations, should not have begun with, nay, should not have noticed at all, those duties which a man owes to himself, and, foremost amongst them, the duty of cultivating his own health. ”

“ And so daily and hourly do we feel that the moral imperfections of the community are fit subjects for such altruistic efforts as may help to raise the average morality.
While we thus recognize that our well-being depends so greatly on the well-being of others—their health and bodily capacities, their sense and knowledge, and their moral qualities—that due regard for others is essential to the happiness of self, we see further that each member of the body social gains directly by the possession and exercise of such qualities as lead or enable him to help his fellows. ”

“ Who can weigh virtue, or even fortune against health, or moral and mental qualities against bodily? Who can measure probabilities against certainties? There has been some good as well as evil in the discipline of suffering; and there are diseases, such as consumption, which have exercised a refining and softening influence on the character. Youth is too inexperienced to balance such nice considerations; parents do not often think of them, or think of them too late. ”

“ In most of the practical sciences, the ends are derived; the end of Medicine is Health, which is an end subsidiary to the final end of human happiness. So it is with Navigation, with Politics, with Education, and others. In all of them, we recognize the bearing upon human welfare, or happiness, as a common, comprehensive, and crowning end. On the theory of Utility, Morals is also governed by this highest end. ”

“ Man's moral mercury, rising or falling, registers his healing ability and fitness to teach. You should practise well what you know, and you will then advance in proportion to your honesty and fidelity, — qualities which insure success in this Science; but it requires a higher understanding to teach this subject properly and correctly, than to heal the most difficult case.
The baneful effect of evil associates is less seen than felt. ”

“ The old maxim, that "Knowledge is power," is a true one, but there is still a greater truth: "Knowledge is Safety." Safety amid physical ills that beset mankind, and safety amid the moral pitfalls that surround so many young people, is the great crying demand of the age. ”

“ If we would be eminently pious, benevolent, and good, we must be healthy. If we would be endowed with wisdom, virtue, and love, we must be healthy. If we would win men's deepest confidence and God's highest approval, we must be healthy. If we would develop most vigorously all our powers of mind and heart, and give the richest possible culture to our souls, we must be sound in body. If we would impart the greatest possible intellectual and moral vigor to the [Pg 94] generation to come, we must obey the laws of health. ”

“ But — pace the doctors and all their materialistic followers — I question very much whether bodily health, the mere absence of physical disease, be nearly as indispensable a condition of happiness, as certain peculiarities of the mental and moral constitution. ”

“ Men are more concerned with the practical basis of morality than with its sentiment, and with the pecuniary aspects of domestic life than with its physical and mental suffering. We all may need medicine for moral ills, yet the very intangibleness of purity makes us slow to formulate rules for its growth. Under the guidance of the wise in spirit and knowledge, much can be done to create a higher standard of marriage and to proportion the number of births according to the health and income of parents. ”

“ Here in this world they certainly do, for all sages agree on this: that happiness is only attainable through the practice of virtue, and if this be so, the converse must necessarily be true, and those who do not practise it must be unhappy. As the physical health is governed by certain hygienic laws whose infraction inevitably produces disease, so is the spiritual health governed by the moral law, whose infraction also as certainly brings suffering. ”

“ Social Disease and Its Causes.—Rural morals are a phase of the public health of the community. Immorality is a kind of social disease, for which the community needs to find a remedy. The amount of moral ill varies widely, but it can be increased by neglect or lessened by effort, as surely as can the amount of physical disease. Moral ill is due to the individual and to the community. The judgment of the individual may be warped, his moral consciousness defective, or his will weak. He may have low standards and ill-adjusted relationships. ”

“ Now, at last, in this progressive age, when the morality of life is more widely studied, and the laws of health and economy are better understood, earnest and hard-working men should be induced to at least give fair and unprejudiced examination to a system which claims to be once most moral, most wholesome, and most economical. ”

“ The chief value of the book to the young themselves is its convincing statement of the fundamental truth that happiness, health, and power are on the side of morality. Stated merely as an ethical proposition, this will not have any new weight. But shown as a physiological principle, founded in Nature herself, bearing always with it its own rewards and penalties, physical and moral, it must be of immense service. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This hypothesis, therefore, solves all that objection to the divine care and goodness which the promiscuous distribution of good and evil (I do not mean in the doubtful advantages of riches and grandeur, but in the unquestionably important distinctions of health and sickness, strength and infirmity, bodily ease and pain, mental alacrity and depression) is apt on so many occasions to create. This one truth changes the nature of things; gives order to confusion; makes the moral world of a piece with the natural. ”

“ But how shall we reform the man who has more animal than moral courage, and who has not the true idea of good? Through human consciousness, convince the mortal of his mistake in seeking material means for gaining happiness. Reason is the most active human faculty. Let that inform the sentiments and awaken the man's dormant sense of moral obligation, and by degrees he will learn the nothingness of the pleasures of human sense and the grandeur and bliss of a spiritual sense, which silences the material or corporeal. ”

“ Things absolutely necessary to healthy existence were necessarily known from the earliest ages, unless indeed we imagine that the primeval man was created in a state of physical and moral disease, that he might grope and blunder his way into health, as some theorists assert that he groped and blundered his way from a tiger into a moral being, and from a monkey into a man. ”

“ They are thus far the stepping-stones of faith. And those who have learned that health is the reward which man may gain by moral discipline, that mental vigour may be augmented by the wise (or moral) use of food, and that education is the systematic exercise of moral responsibility in any or all the affairs of life, may find that in the practice and pursuit of the truths of Science they are conscious of a religious education which is a light to the feet. Such matters are factors in life, which may educate us in a reverent appreciation of religious truth and divine government of the world. ”

“ Habits of neatness and order, of kindness and ready help, of self-sacrifice and self-control, become lifelong in their persistence and develop a physical as well as moral conscience which makes for public health. ”

“ According to the physical sanction, if you live a temperate life, you will be healthy. You will have the physical reward of your moral goodness. Health is almost essential to success. Hence, if you would be successful, live a good life. ”

“ The entire education of children should be such as will form habits of obedience to moral and spiritual law, whereby they may meet and master that belief in so-called physical laws which breeds disease. ”

“ The profit of bodily health. A body which does not labour, either with brain or hand, is an easy prey to disease. The brain if used becomes strengthened for further use. The whole bodily frame is kept in health by wholesome work. 3. Profit to the moral nature. Labour calls for some form of self-sacrifice. It develops habits of painstaking and diligence which are helpful to a man’s moral nature. It helps the spiritual part of the man by helping the bodily, inasmuch as a strong [p. 375] and healthy body is the best instrument for a morally healthy soul. ”

“ Truth and correct practice usually lie between extremes. But I do and must insist, that the connection between cleanliness of body and purity of moral character, is much more close and direct than has usually been supposed. ”