Food and Morals / 6th Edition

by J. F. Clymer

“This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice, he is a glutton and a drunkard.” That is, bad conditions of the physical nature, wrought by gluttony and drunkenness, have made him stubborn and rebellious. It will not help the case to say that his stubbornness and rebellion caused his gluttony and drunkenness, for if they did, then his soul must act on the body. His morals must influence his manners, and therefore his manners must reflect on his morals; they must interact, which is just the point we make; that his appetite and lust fire the temperament or disposition, and a fiery disposition provokes appetite and lust to wilder indulgences.

A remarkable fact, in this day of advanced science and revelation, is that Christians and moralists in their work of reform have paid so little attention to the influence of the body on the soul. Jesus Christ more than any other teacher or reformer recognized the demoralizing and debasing influence of bad bodily conditions. Hence he almost always healed maladies of the body before he entered his principles upon the soul. It is true that his many miracles on the bodies of men were primarily intended to reveal his divinity; yet divinity in its manifestations always runs over the whole line of the natural before passing into the supernatural; therefore Christ’s miracles on the bodies of men had a sanitary side to them. The man with the leprosy was in the poorest condition bodily to hear favorably any talk about moral sweetness; hence Christ healed his diseased body, in connection with his moral teachings. His example with the blind and hungry and deaf in this respect ought not to go for nothing with those of us who seek to save men in our day. Philanthropists and Christians for the most part have overlooked the power of a debased body on the soul. They forget that Paul likens a body that has sinful habitudes to a thing of death, as compared with the soul that seeks to live the new life in Christ Jesus. Therefore good men have labored to create in themselves and those whom they seek to reform, certain emotional conditions of the spirit, by a tenacious adherence to creeds, or the patient performance of a set round of religious duties, and all this regardless of bad physical conditions begotten by bad habits of eating and drinking. While they have been struggling to bring their own souls and the souls of others into holy attitudes, all the basilar forces of the body have run riot within, and perhaps beyond, the pale of human customs and human laws. If you want to empty a boiler of steam, it will not help you much by lifting the safety valve if you still keep water in the boiler and fire in the furnace. Prayer, Bible reading and Psalm singing will not help a man much to get rid of his sins, if he keeps up a set of bodily habits which fire the body and inflame the soul to continue its sinning. That you may see the connection more clearly between vice and victuals, let me show you how food may damage our bodies and demoralize our souls.

I am fully aware of the difficulties I encounter in entering this thought on your minds. Because religion has been considered as having little or nothing to do with the body, I shall encounter the settled opinions of good men to this effect. Because our popular methods of eating have the sanction of custom and the defense of long established habits, I may not criticise them without losing the favor of those who are content with things as they are. Because I shall call in question many indulgences of appetite hitherto considered sinless, I shall run the risk of being called a fanatic or fool. Because I shall preach the New Testament doctrine of self-denial many will say this is a hard saying—“who can bear it?” But with the hope that I may unfold to you a glorious realm of liberty from the bondage of bodily propensities, I cheerfully do my duty and leave the consequences for God to look after.

Very few of us are aware of the great physical demoralization and spiritual wickedness, brought on us and our children, by bad habits of eating, as to the kind of food, the mode of its preparation, and the manner and times of taking it. We refuse to think of our indulgences of appetite as the cause of our physical ailments and premature death, and much less will we allow ourselves to believe that these indulgences have anything to do with forming our morals or shaping our characters or determining our eternal destiny.

And yet I aver, without the fear of successful refutation, that three-fourths of all our bodily ailments or diseases, and many of our immoral acts, are the legitimate results of improper dietetic habits. If these habits do not effect us directly, they do so indirectly by lowering the tone of the whole system, physical and moral, causing us to break down prematurely into some disease or deviltry, under the pressure of legitimate toil or immoral provocation. How is it possible to account for the death of one half the human family before five years of age, unless we trace it to the violation of physical laws in some way connected with the eating habits alike of parent and child? Many children enter the world with such a low state of inherited physical vitality, and so little moral tone, that they are unable to resist the attacks of bodily disease or throw it off when on them, and much less able to throw off moral disease and rise above their immoral heritage if spared to pass through childhood to years of maturity. Such children not only carry in their little bodies the physical weaknesses of their parents, but also the specific immoral tendencies found in the conditions of their parentage. And more than this, should their endowment of vitality be sufficient to carry them over the death line for infants, they are subject to such unnatural relations to dress and diet that it becomes a natural impossibility for them to live. In this way many children die prematurely, not by the arbitrary edict of God, but by the violation of law. And if God should save their lives by special suspension of his laws, more damage would be done to the moral harmony of the universe than to let them die. I know it is a common custom to ascribe all sickness and death to the direct and arbitrary action of Divine Providence. That is, if one overeats, or eats innutritious food, or at improper times, making himself sickly, so that he becomes an easy prey to disease, and dies suddenly or at the noon tide of life, all the good people say—“What a strange Providence!” As if God had everything to do with such a death, and the deceased had little or nothing to do with it. I incline to the opinion that Divine Providence has little or nothing to do with such deaths only in so far as Divine Providence is in the laws of life violated. The primary cause of all premature deaths is violated law. God does not arbitrarily kill anybody. Most of those who die in infancy or in early life, come to death by the violation of God’s laws written in their bodies. If these laws were obeyed in us and in our ancestry, most of us ought to live beyond three score years and ten, and drop from this life into the other in a ripe, mellow old age, just as ripe fruit drops from its bough in autumn time. But you ask where is God in the many untimely deaths that occur? I answer He is present in his great hearted goodness to help the dying to an eternal victory over death, if they will only let Him. He is present to bind up the hearts that are breaking with sorrow for the departed, and to make a sudden, untimely, and needless death a monument of warning to those still living, thus making the wrath of man to praise Him. If therefore our children die in infancy, because we have entailed on them feeble bodies by our violation of law, God does not kill them, but they die through violated law, and he in His goodness takes the little ones to His bosom, the seat and source of all law. Let us not then charge our sorrows to the willful enactment of our Heavenly Father. He taketh no pleasure in the death of him that dieth. When he gives life to us, He intends that we shall keep it as long as possible.

Having given us life, all the forces of His boundless nature are engaged to maintain it in us until He is ready to harvest us as the farmer does the ripened grain. The God of nature and the God of grace are not in antagonism. “The one God is in all and over all.” A kingdom divided against itself cannot stand. If, therefore, we die this side of three score years and ten—seventy years—we die untimely. It is high time that good men were awake to this fact, and ceased charging over to Divine Providence what legitimately belongs to ourselves. “Jesus Christ came to destroy him that hath the power of death, that is the devil;” and when the philosophy of Jesus is wrought up into human lives by obedience to physical laws, the power of disease and death over our bodies will be very much broken. The victory over death can be so far achieved by men in the body that they need not die until their minds and hearts have received all the development in this world that infinite love ordains. That is, men may so baffle the monster of death by obedience to law as to keep him at bay until their souls have taken on such Christly ripeness that they shall burst and break their bodies, as the ripening chestnuts break their burrs under the frosts of autumn. We have, therefore, no right to ascribe to supernatural agency any phenomena which can be explained on natural principles. Disobedience to law brings penalties. There is nothing that men need to see more in their efforts at reform than the connection between their sufferings and their disobedience. Now, disobedience to the laws of life brings the penalties, sickness and premature death. There is no field where our disobedience manifests itself more frequently and with so little thought of consequences, as in our false and unnatural habits of eating and drinking, which damage the body and demoralize the soul.

“The Blood is the Life.” This is the declaration alike of revelation and of science. Evolutionary processes may induce a variation in the form or number of the blood corpuscles, but they can not set aside the law that the building and rebuilding of all the organs involved in bodily or mental acts comes from the blood alone. The physical, mental and moral natures are so intimately connected that that which affects one, affects the others. So that a man’s mental and moral nature, as well as his physical, can very largely be determined by the quality of his blood. Now it is a physiological fact that our blood is made out of the food we eat. That food which enters the mouth and is assimilated, makes blood. By the marvelous processes of digestion and assimilation our food is transformed into blood; and the blood passing through the veins and arteries repairs the waste tissues and forms new ones, thus building up our bodies and sustaining life. It follows then that our bodies are made of the food we eat. Evidently it was the design of our Creator that the prime object of eating should be the building up of tissue—muscles, bones and brains. That this may be a pleasure to us, He has associated with eating the delights of appetite. But most of us have so far perverted the divine order as to make the pleasures of appetite the chief object of eating. “Give us something good to eat,” is the great cry of humanity, and the goodness of food is gauged by the sensations of the palate and not by the law of nutrition. Most of us determine the goodness of our food by the amount of sensual delight it imparts to the palate, no matter how much damage it may do beyond to the delicate and intricate structure of the stomach and viscera. Hence a vast amount of food enters the mouth that makes bad blood, blood that in itself is corrupt, and carries poisonous particles to every organ in the system, putting us in splendid condition to be easily provoked to some outburst of anger, passion or revenge. My hearers, there is a sure and vital connection between bad blood and bad morals. Blood always tells in morals as well as in muscles. Blood has power throughout the whole realm of life, whether it be in a human body, in society, or in the body of a horse on the racecourse.

You ask, what kind of food makes bad blood? I answer, very much of the flesh of animals, that forms the staple diet of most of us. Sty-fed pigs and stall-fed oxen are fattened under the most unlawful and unhealthful conditions possible; shut up in the dark, cut off from exercise, the fat deposited on their bodies is made up of the waste matter that the life-forces of the animal have been unable to expel. This waste fatty matter, surcharged with unexpelled excretions, is liable to induce disease in all who consume it. It has established tuberculosis in captive lions, and in cats and dogs, and in other carnivora; and it were folly to assume that mankind, feeding upon such poisonous food, should wholly escape. Even in the living animal this effete unexpelled poisonous waste breeds vermin, such as have been found in pork, which cannot be destroyed by ordinary cooking or by the process of digestion, and hence live and generate in the human body, producing disease and death. I am not now making a plea for the absolute disuse of animal food, but against the bad quality of very much of it, and also against the inordinate use of that which may be good in quality. A certain amount of animal food is useful for our nourishment, especially in winter time, because of its heat producing qualities. But meat every day, and at every meal, is in no way necessary for the proper sustenance of the human system.

The use of large quantities of animal food, however free from disease-germs, as a staple article of diet makes the blood gross, coarse and corrupt, filling the body with scrofulous elements, sending poison to every part of the system, causing it to break out in running sores, salt-rheum, tetter and the like, producing an inordinate appetite, throwing every organ of the body into frictional relations to every other organ. It is a matter of every-day surprise to me that any human being will consent to eat the flesh of pigs. Consider their uncleanness, their selfish, greedy habits, the vast amount of corruption that enters into their bodies, their want of exercise, their impure breathing, their lack of sudorific glands or emunctories, through which effete tissues and morbid accumulations may be expelled; and think, when you eat pork, of the train of horrid elements which enter into your body. And your body thus debased by a low order of animal flesh, the effect must be to make you take on the disposition and tendencies of the hog. God’s bill of fare in the eleventh chapter of Leviticus excluded from the tables of the Jews the hog and all water animals except those that had fins and scales. This bill of fare was given to the Jews not only for the preservation of their health, but, as God’s great purpose was moral reform, He had an eye single to their moral condition in the matter of their eating. Does any one doubt that the unhealthy, ugly, and vicious elements that make up the flesh of most of the animals we eat, enter our blood, and in that way affect the disposition or carriage of the soul? I am confident, if there was less demand for animal food the quality would be very much better. Animals would not be subject to false and unhealthy generation, and false and hasty methods of growth. They would come up more in keeping with the laws of their nature, and come to us with more healthy and better qualities. As for the hog, if man would not domesticate him, he could not propagate his species. He would become extinct just like the lion, leopard, and hyena, under the march of civilization. As the blessings of civilized life reach us, you notice the carnivorous or flesh-eating animals become extinct. So it seems to me that with the developments of civilization there ought to be such moral refinements in human beings that they would grow away from their carnivorous tendencies, and eat such food as tends to develop the mental and moral faculties, and not the animal propensities. Among animals you find that those that live on the flesh of other animals are the most vicious and destructive, such as the lion, leopard, and hyena. Those animals that live on the grains and the higher order of foods are the best, most beautiful, and most useful, such as the horse and cow. If this law obtains among animals, why not among men? Beyond a doubt it does. If you want proof of this, study the character and lives of those who live largely on animal food, and you will find them very animal-like in all their relations—restive, impatient, passionate, ugly in their ways, fiery in their disposition, easily provoked, readily put out of humor. And if you could look into their private lives you would find all their baser qualities having the fullest sway, stopping, it may be, inside the fence of human laws and customs, but seldom considering the claims of a higher and divine law. I charge, then, very much of our household misery, domestic woe, and connubial wretchedness, to unrestrained lust begotten in the body by the inordinate use of animal food.

We forget, my hearers, that the great law of nature, “Like produces like,” is universal. “Every seed after its kind is the law of all creation.” There is no exception to this law. This principle obtains not only in the production of life, but in the processes of its development. If my position about the intimacy of soul and body is true, then, if a man’s body is made up chiefly of flesh taken from diseased animals, and his whole physical frame is saturated with the irritating and exciting condiments of what is popularly called good food, the whole bias of his bodily powers will be toward animalism. All the impressions and impulses that the soul receives from such a body are beastly and debasing. Like produces like in the formation of physical tissue out of food, as well as in the generation of stock in the stall. Hence I hold that very much of the wickedness of mankind is the natural expression of physical beastliness rather than the outflow of innate viciousness. A body made up largely of all manner of nerve-goading, passion-producing, anger-generating elements, such as are found in the gross animal dishes with their stimulating adjuncts, just as surely drives the soul to sin as a tempest drives a feather before it.