Dear Sir: Yours of February 1 received, and contents noted. Thanks for your suggestion. Yes; we will do it. We will publish Mr. Clymer’s sermon in so cheap a pamphlet form that we can give it an almost universal circulation.
We do this because we believe with you most fully in the gospel of hygiene.
Yours very truly,
FOWLER & WELLS.
[RELATION OF FOOD TO MORALS.]
A SERMON PREACHED BY
REV. J. F. CLYMER,
In the First Methodist Episcopal Church, Auburn, New York,
On Sunday, June 20th, 1880.
“If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and that when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them, then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gates of his place; and they shall say unto the elders of his city: This our son is stubborn and rebellious; he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard.”—Deut. xxi. 18-20.
We have had much teaching that has left the impression on our minds that the soul is the only source and seat of all the vice in human life. Because it is written “The imaginations of the thoughts of the natural heart, are only evil continually,” total depravity has been fixed on the spirit nature of man; that is, all the bad or immoral elements entering into human life have been attributed to the innate or inborn ugliness of the soul. Accepting the Scriptural truth that “the soul that sinneth, it shall die,” we have come to think that sin has its center, seat, source and circumference in the soul, or the immaterial nature of man. Hence we readily admit the fact that influences, good or bad, may pass over from the soul to the body, but we do not so readily admit that other fact, equally true, that influence good or bad may go over from the body to the soul. The road over which vicious thoughts and lustful imaginations pass from the soul to the body is the highway over which unbridled appetites, unrestrained passions and unsubdued lusts in the body may go to the soul, goading it to the wildest conceptions of vice and lecherous imaginations. The warm rays of the sun may gender rottenness in the muddy pool; so also will the effluvia from the pool poison the sunlight near it. The soul by its vicious thoughts and imaginations will entail an immoral tone on the body; so also will the body react on the soul, by its appetites, passions and propensities, increasing the viciousness of the soul by pushing it to courses of vice not directly and immediately its own. In our text is found an illustration of this thought. A father and mother bring their stubborn and rebellious son to the elders of the Jewish church. They assign, as the cause of his stubbornness and rebellion, gluttony and drunkenness, than which there are no vices that demoralize the body more, or goad the soul to greater crimes. Hear it: