After all, physical health is the best possible basis for the attainment of mental, moral and spiritual health. All building begins with the foundation. We do not first suspend the steeple in the air and then build the church under it. So also, the building of the temple of human character should begin by laying the foundation in physical health.
We have known people who had attained high intellectual, moral and spiritual development and then suffered utter shipwreck physically, mentally and in every other way, because ignorantly they had violated the laws of their physical nature.
There are others who believe that the possession of occult knowledge and the achievement of mastership confer absolute control over Nature's forces and phenomena on the physical plane. These people believe that a man is not a master if he does not miraculously heal all manner of disease and raise the dead.
If such things were possible, they would overthrow the Laws of Cause and Effect and of Compensation. They would abolish the basic principles of morality and constructive spirituality. If it is possible in one case to heal disease and to overcome death through the fiat of the will of a master, then it must be possible in all cases. If so, then we can ignore the existence of Nature's laws, indulge our appetites and passions to the fullest extent, and when the natural results of our transgressions overtake us, we can go to a healer or master and have our diseases instantly and painlessly removed, like a bad tooth.
I say this with all due reverence for, and faith in, the efficacy of true prayer and with full knowledge of the healing power of therapeutic faith, but I do not believe that God, or Nature, or a master or metaphysical formulas can or will make good in a miraculous way for the inevitable results of our transgressions of the natural laws that govern our being.
If such miraculous healing were possible and of common occurrence, what occasion would there be for the exercise of reason, will and self-control? What would become of the scientific basis of morality and constructive spirituality?
All this leads us to the following conclusions:
"If there is in operation a constructive principle of Nature on the ethical, moral and spiritual planes of being, with which we must align ourselves and to which we must conform our conscious and voluntary activities in order to achieve self-completion, self-content, individual completion and happiness, then this constructive principle must be in operation also in our physical bodies and in their corelated physical, mental and emotional activities. If the constructive principle is active in the physical as well as in the moral and spiritual realms, then the established harmonic relationship of the physical to the constructive law of its being must constitute the morality of the physical; and from this it follows that the achievement of health on the physical plane is as much under our conscious and voluntary control as the working out of our individual salvation on the higher planes of life."
To recapitulate:
First, our well-being on all planes and in all relationships of life depends upon the existence, recognition and practical application of the great fundamental laws and principles just explained.