vol. xxx, no. 4 april 1926 universal brotherhood - a fact in nature

IN SEARCH OF HEALTH
AN divides his time between losing his health by various
forms of ill living, and trying to find it by various forms of
artificial living. He is entirely averse to admitting that he
is to blame for his evil state, and he is permeated by the
rooted belief that there is some short cut to health without unduly inter-
fering with his habits.
However he may have himself contributed to his loss of health,
he is everlastingly and hopefully looking out for some way of getting out
of the inevitable consequences of his conduct, and in this optimism he
has been largely supported by the medical profession, which, in the past,
at least, has been largely curative, rather than preventive - it has dealt
more with the cure than the cause of disease.
Reading of the triumphs of medical and surgical science, men have
looked even more hopefully to the relief from the consequences of ill
living. Yet it is not many years since a leading medical journal pointed
out that leaving out the preventable diseases of children, the health and
death statistics were practically unaltered, and Wiggram points out in
the Decalogue of Science, that while we have largely overcome microbial
disease, two factors were operating to maintain the status quo. First,
our powers of resistance to microbial disease were lessening, and secondly,
functional and other non-microbe diseases were taking their places. The
increase in nervous and mental disease, he points out, is enormous.
To paraphrase, "It is not what goeth into a man, but that which
goes out from him" that counts - the virtue and power that he loses.
We do not die because a microbe attacks us, but because we have
lost or weakened our power of resistance - we have weakened the protective
elements within us by our conduct.
MTe are bombarded by germs and microbes all the time; they lurk
in the water we drink and the air we breathe; and the fact that we live
at all is silent evidence, not of germlessness, but of the courageous fight
kept up by the cleansing guardians within us, by the porters at our gates
and the battalions within. We talk of septic germs giving trouble in
our wounds and cuts but the evil should be laid not to the germ, but
to ourselves.
While there is one teaching common to every religion - that as
ye sow, so ye shall reap -we all believe and hope in our hearts that