“For the preservation of life God has ordained certain laws to be observed, the neglect of which necessarily brings disease and premature death.” Hence it is that if any of us are sick——except from accidents or congenital causes——it is our own fault. If we have dyspepsia, and the endless afflictions resulting from this parent of diseases, it is our own fault——either of ignorance or carelessness. If neuralgia, “sciatica,” rheumatism, gout, or sick-headache afflicts us, we can thank ourselves; for the simple question is——whether it will “pay” to keep clear of them? It is all very fine to bowl along without thought; to eat, drink, and breathe, without using our brains or consciences, and to shun the best products of the brains of others who make this subject the study of their lives, and when the inevitable sickness comes shift the responsibility on to the Lord. It is rank blasphemy, nevertheless. In the struggle of life, when so many of His children are engrossed in the vital question of bread-winning; when to obtain the mere necessities of life, or, at most, these and the ordinary comforts, requires all the time, early and late, of so large a portion of the human family, it is not to be supposed that the Creator designed that the due and proper care of the body——its development and the maintenance of a healthy state——should be a matter of such complications as to be beyond the comprehension of ordinary mortals, or require the expenditure of an amount of time that would prove embarrassing to all, and totally impossible to many. Nor should Christians conclude that an “all-wise, all-merciful, and all-powerful Father” designed that the creatures formed in “His own likeness” should alone, of all created beings, be necessarily subject to the multifarious forms of disease, that in fact, under present conditions, do so continually afflict them. Happily such conclusions are not borne out by rational experience; for, in practice, it is found that not only is less trouble and expense required to keep well, than to pursue a course that is promotive of disease; and to get well when disease is really fastened upon us, than to continue the general regimen that has worked the mischief, and seek to counteract it by poisonous drugs; but in fact it has been clearly shown by innumerable living examples, that neither much time, trouble, or expense is necessary to maintain the body in a state of absolute health——perfect ease and comfort——when once this state has been reached, or to restore to comparative health a large proportion of “miserable sinners” who, without a radical change in their mode of life, must continue to suffer from their self-inflicted pains.