CONSEQUENCES.
The results are seen on every hand, in almost every individual. The stomach becomes weak and deranged, the body heavy and in-elastic, the mind foggy and sluggish, the temper irritable.
In no other department of American life do we so much need a thorough reform. Fashionable people hate the word reform, but in this connection no other word will answer; we must set about a thorough, earnest, radical reform.
The Creator has so contrived our bodies, He has made them so resistant and elastic, that an occasional abuse seems to make little impression.
For example, a man may get drunk once a month, and at the end of a dozen years he seems scarcely touched by the vice; although, as the physiologist has shown us, upon each indulgence the lining coat of the stomach is strangely inflamed, and changed in appearance; indeed, for three or four days after each debauch the mucous lining of the stomach continues to exude a matter which closely resembles pus. Besides these marked and apparently alarming effects, it is well known that alcohol is a powerful poison to every tissue of the body, especially to the nerve; and yet the alcohol is not digested, but goes, bodily and unchanged, creeping through every atom of the brain itself; nevertheless, after hours of deep, death-like lethargy, the man awakens, and his wonderful mechanism is ready to grapple again with the duties of life.
A child takes into its mouth a bit of tobacco. It is followed by a pale face, cold sweat, alarming palpitations, and violent vomiting. And yet, after a little practice, the human system may be deluged with this powerful, narcotic poison,—a man's mouth may be kept swimming, month after month, with the strongest juice of the strongest tobacco,—his very perspiration may be so filled with this intense poison, that, falling on the battle-field, the most loathsome beast of prey will not touch his body. Yet so complete is his facility of adaptation, so immense his power of resistance, that, for a life-time, his bodily, mental and moral machinery will struggle on in the midst of this sea of poison.
And so it is with this almost universal vice of improper and excessive eating. The stomach and liver are clogged and deranged, the blood is filled with crudities and impurities, the brain is crowded with this vicious blood, and yet the Good Father has given us such an immense reserve, that we can bear all this, and still have force enough left to move about, to think, to feel, and sometimes to have hours of real enjoyment.
Our Father gives us "signs;" he hangs out "flags of distress,"— pimples, and blotches, and sores, a red nose, inflamed eyelids, etc.; besides, he gives us rheumatism, gout, and numerous other aches, but he lets us live on for years, apparently in the hope that we may learn something.
Our American system of diet is altogether bad. There is too great variety, the food is too rich, the cooking is often very bad, we eat too frequently, and we eat at the wrong times.
I confess to a deep personal interest in this subject. It is my sad, but most deliberate conviction, that I have wasted a large part of my life-force by taking too much food. I have not made this mistake for some years; but the gray hairs began to make their appearance before I learned about it.