It requires no more time to breathe pure than impure air——and no more time or expense to obtain it: it is as free as air, and will fill our homes, without money and without price, unless we seal them against its admission. The poorest factory-operative that goes by the bell, can with a pint of water and a single towel, if need be, take a three-minute bath any or every morning, if he appreciates its importance and is conscientious in his living. It costs no more to eat enough than to over-indulge the appetite, as is the universal rule, high and low, until nausea and lack of appetite compel abstinence or moderation. It costs money to poison the system with beer or tobacco, and thus shorten one’s life and impair its usefulness, and transmit evil moral and physical tendencies to his offspring, but it is a ten-fold saving to keep clear of these evils. And so it proves throughout the list: it is cheap to keep well, and dear to get sick. “So to observe Nature as to learn her laws and obey them, is to observe the commandments of the Lord to do them. It has so long been the habit to exalt the mind as the noble, spiritual, and immortal part, at the expense of the body, as the vile, material and mortal part, that, while it is not thought at all strange that every possible care and attention should be given to mental cultivation, a person who should give the same sort of careful attention to his body would be thought somewhat meanly of. And yet I am sure that a wise man who would ease best the burden of life, can not do better than watchfully to keep undefiled and holy——that is, healthy——the noble temple of his body. Is it not a glaring inconsistency that men should pretend to fall into ecstasies of admiration of the temples which they have built with their own hands, and to claim reverence for their ruins, and, at the same time, should have no reverence for, or should actually speak contemptuously of, that most complex, ingenious, and admirable structure which the human body is? However, if they really neglect it, it is secure of its revenge——no one will come to much by his most strenuous mental exercises, except upon the basis of a good organization; for a sound body is assuredly the foundation of a sound mind.” (Maudsley).