CHAPTER XLVI NATURE'S LITTLE BILL Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small; Though with patience He stands waiting, with exactness grinds He all. Frederick von Logau. Because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil.—Ecclesiastes. Man is a watch, wound up at first but never Herrick. Old age seizes upon an ill-spent youth like fire upon a rotten house.—South. Last Sunday a young man died here of extreme old age at twenty-five.—John Newton. If you will not hear Reason, she'll surely rap your knuckles. Poor Richard's Sayings. "OH! oh! ah!" exclaimed Franklin; "what have I done to merit these cruel sufferings?" "Many things," replied the Gout; "you have eaten and drunk too freely, and too much indulged those legs of yours in your indolence." Nature seldom presents her bill on the day you violate her laws. But if you overdraw your account at her bank, and give her a mortgage on your body, be sure she will foreclose. She may loan you all you want; but, like Shylock, she will demand the last ounce of flesh. She rarely brings in her cancer bill before the victim is forty years old. She does not often annoy a man with her drink bill until he is past his prime, and then presents it in the form of Bright's disease, fatty degeneration of the heart, drunkard's liver, or some similar disease. What you pay the saloon keeper is but a small part of your score. We often hear it said that the age of miracles is past. We marvel that a thief dying on the cross should appear that very day in Paradise; but behold how that bit of meat or vegetable on a Hawarden breakfast table is snatched from Death, transformed into thought, and on the following night shakes Parliament in the magnetism and oratory of a Gladstone. The age of miracles past, when three times a day right before our eyes Nature performs miracles greater even than raising the dead? Watch that crust of bread thrown into a cell in Bedford Jail and devoured by a poor, hungry tinker; cut, crushed, ground, driven by muscles, dissolved by acids and alkalies; absorbed and hurled into the mysterious red river of life. Scores of little factories along this strange stream, waiting for this crust, transmute it as it passes, as if by magic, here into a bone cell, there into gastric juice, here into bile, there into a nerve cell, yonder into a brain cell. We can not trace the processes by which this crust arrives at the muscle and acts, arrives at the brain and thinks. We can not see the manipulating hand which throws back and forth the shuttle which weaves Bunyan's destinies, nor can we trace the subtle alchemy which transforms this prison crust into the finest allegory in the world, the Pilgrim's Progress. But we do know that, unless we supply food when the stomach begs and clamors, brain and muscle can not continue to act; and we also know that unless the food is properly chosen, unless we eat it properly, unless we maintain good digestion by exercise of mind and body, it will not produce the speeches of a Gladstone or the allegories of a Bunyan. Truly we are fearfully and wonderfully made. Imagine a cistern which would transform the foul sewage of a city into pure drinking water in a second's time, as the black venous blood, foul with the ashes of burned-up brain cells and débris of worn-out tissues, is transformed in the lungs, at every breath, into pure, bright, red blood. Each drop of blood from that magic stream of liquid life was compounded by a divine Chemist. In it float all our success and destiny. In it are the extensions and limits of our possibilities. In it are health and long life, or disease and premature death. In it are our hopes and our fears, our courage, our cowardice, our energy or lassitude, our strength or weakness, our success or failure. In it are susceptibilities of high or broad culture, or pinched or narrow faculties handed down from an uncultured ancestry. From it our bones and nerves, our muscles and brain, our comeliness or ugliness, all come. are locked up the elements of a vicious or a gentle life, the tendencies of a criminal or a saint. How important is it, then, that we should obey the laws of health, and thus maintain the purity and power of this our earthly River of Life! In it "We hear a great deal about the 'vile body,'" said Spencer, "and many are encouraged by the phrase to transgress the laws of health. But Nature quietly suppresses those who treat thus disrespectfully one of her highest products, and leaves the world to be peopled by the descendants of those who are not so foolish." Nature gives to him that hath. She shows him the contents of her vast storehouse, and bids him take all he wants and be welcome. But she will not let him keep for years what he does not use. Use or lose is her motto. Every atom we do not utilize this great economist snatches from us. If you put your arm in a sling and do not use it, Nature will remove the muscle almost to the bone, and the arm will become useless, but in exact proportion to your efforts to use it again she will gradually restore what she took away. Put your mind in the sling of idleness, or inactivity, and in like manner she will remove your brain, even to imbecility. The blacksmith wants one powerful arm, and she gives it to him, but reduces the other. You can, if you will, send all the energy of your life into some one faculty, but all your other faculties will starve. A young lady may wear tight corsets if she chooses, but Nature will remove the rose from her cheek and put pallor there. She will replace a clear complexion with muddy hues and sallow spots. She will take away the elastic step, the luster from the eye. Don't expect to have health for nothing. Nothing in this world worth anything can be had for nothing. Health is the prize of a constant struggle. Nature passes no act without affixing a penalty for its violation. Whenever she is outraged she will have her penalty, although it take a life. A great surgeon stood before his class to perform a certain operation which the elaborate mechanism and minute knowledge of modern science had only recently made possible. With strong and gentle hand he did. his work successfully so far as his part of the terrible business went; and then he turned to his pupils and said, "Two years ago a safe and simple operation might have cured this disease. Six years ago a wise way of life might have prevented it. We have done our best as the case now stands, but Nature will have her word to say. She does not always consent to the repeal of her capital sentences." Next day the patient died. Apart from accidents, we hold our life largely at will. What business have seventy-five thousand physicians in the United States? It is our own fault that even one-tenth of them get a respectable living. What a commentary upon our modern American civilization that three hundred and fifty thousand people in this country die annually from absolutely preventable diseases! Seneca said, "The gods have given us a long life, but we have made it short." Few people know enough to become old. It is a rare thing for a person to die of old age. Only three or four out of a hundred die of anything like old age. But Nature evidently intended, by the wonderful mechanism of the human body, that we should live well up to a century. Thomas Parr, of England, lived to the age of one hundred and fifty-two years. He was married when he was a hundred and twenty, and did not leave off work until he was a hundred and thirty. The great Dr. Harvey examined Parr's body, but found no cause of death except a change of living. Henry Jenkins, of Yorkshire, England, lived to be a hundred and sixty-nine, and would probably have lived longer had not the king brought him to London, where luxuries hastened his death. The court records of England show that he was a witness in a trial a hundred and forty years before his death. He swam across a rapid river when he was a hundred. There is nothing we are more ignorant of than the physiology and chemistry of the human body. Not one person in a thousand can correctly locate important internal organs or describe their use in the animal economy. What an insult to the Creator who fashioned them so wonderfully and fearfully in His own image, that the graduates from our high schools and even universities, and young women who "finish their education," become proficient in the languages, in music, in art, and have the culture of travel, but can not describe or locate the various organs or functions upon which |