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.