V
If the world is the result of an established plan, as some say, it must be the conception of a hideous monster whose three cardinal principles are Disease, Despair and Death. But this much we can say: Though God created us a savage, fortunately man is civilizing Nature's brute and is making him a Man.
Disease is one of Nature's cardinal forces. So, to attain health, we struggle against disease; but health only means the guarding of it through fear. "With all the ills the flesh is heir to," true health is a chimera, an existing state unknown to man.
To be "well" is such a precious condition, that Nature cautions us against expecting to retain health too long, by instructing us, through experience, to prepare for a siege of illness. Thus, disease and illness would seem to be the natural states, and health the artificial condition under which Nature permits us to live. No one goes to his grave without suffering the tortures of some disease and paying the penalty of living. No one is exempt from the inflictions Nature imposes.
The greater portion of our life consists in devising means and medication to relieve us of our states of ill health and disease. Sanitation and all the methods we are capable of discovering and inventing are becoming universally applied to kill and to destroy the menacing germs that God causes to inhabit the air, and that breed and multiply in the fertile flesh of our bodies.
And finally, we are so utterly ignorant of how even to eat, sleep, walk, breathe, stand or sit, that the slightest infringement of the simplest rules of life can, and does, cause us irreparable harm.
If we did not move to help ourselves, Nature would have us live in filth and stagnation.
We seek, discover, or invent all kinds of methods to build health and to remain perfectly strong throughout our lives, and yet, despite it all, we are puny and sickly beings. In fact, I do not think there is such a thing as perfect health. What we may do to correct, insure or perfect our healthy tissues will have a detrimental effect upon some other part of our body. What we do to build up must also tear down. What we do to produce health will, after a certain point, produce disease. This, it seems, is the law not only of life, but also of the universe.
It is regrettable that God did not possess the magnanimity of an Ingersoll and make health contagious instead of disease.