It directs its own emotions.
It supplies the energy for these emotions.
It discriminates in the selection of food and casts out refuse and food not needed.
It forms brain cells and creates mental force with which to control the organism.
It keeps in repair the nerves, which are the telegraph wires connecting the brain with all parts of the body.
It converts the potential energy in the food into heat with which to keep itself warm.
Withal it is not left free to do its work automatically. It has within it a higher intelligence, a spiritual force, which may definitely hamper its workings by getting a wrong control of the telegraph wires, thus interfering with the digestion, the heart action, the lungs and all metabolic changes. The right exercise of this higher intelligence, in turn, depends upon the condition of the body, because when the mechanism of the body is out of repair it hampers mental and spiritual control. Surely man is marvelously made!
The intelligent care of the body,—the temple through which the soul communicates with material conditions,—is a Christian duty. “The priest with liver trouble and the parishioner with indigestion, do not evidence that skilled Christian living so essential to the higher life.”
Certain it is that improper foods affect the disposition, retard the spiritual growth and change the drift of one’s life and of the lives about one.
Man has become so engrossed and hedged about with the complex demands of social, civic, and domestic life, all of which call for undue energy and annoyance and lead him into careless or extravagant habits of eating and living, that he forgets to apply the intelligence which he puts into his business to the care of the machine which does the work. Yet the simple laws of nature in the care of the body, are plainer and easier to follow than the complex habits which he forms. The “simple life” embraces the habits of eating as well as the habits of doing and of thinking.