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

IN SEARCH OF HEALTH
it is not true, that somehow, someway, the results can be avoided or got
round - that we can do or think wrong or folly and escape the conse-
quences, that we can push nature without evoking an exactly similar
push in return. Yet if we are to postulate any sort of Philosophy of
Life, of any Law or Order in the Universe, we are compelled to accept
as an axiom, beyond question or dispute, that on the physical, mental,
or spiritual planes, whether in man or nation, every thought and deed
must bring its inevitable and consequent result on the doer or thinker;
that for every sowing there must be a reaping; for every reaping there
was a past sowing e ach reaping an inevitable and just outcome of
the deed.
"The Future streams up from behind us over our heads to meet us."
This is the keynote of the Greek Drama - the all-dominating, re-
morseless, inevitable Fate or Nemesis, the harvesting of past causes.
It is true that the relation between cause and effect is often not
to be traced, whether we are dealing with national or individual ill health.
The action may be forgotten, or its relation to present evil may be un-
suspected; but we shall go far both in the direction of cure and of pre-
vention, when the relationship and the responsibility are accepted. We
shall no longer lightly violate Law and Order in the hope of evading the
consequences, or that there will be none; and medicine and surgery
would take on a new aspect.
We shall view our bodies as a highly efficient mechanism - only
a living mechanism, which has been misused, and see that while surgery or
medicine may assist, the cure must lie in our own selves. The lost control
must be regained; the abused cells must be encouraged back to normality,
the weakened function made strong. In that light, the drug that 'cures'
is merely staving off the evil day. There is no 'pink pill' which can
'cure' an excess; all that we are doing is at best to avert the evil for a
time, and at worst to start a fresh set of causes.
In the body politic we perhaps maltreat a small nation, and when
as a consequence it becomes a thorn in our side, we placate it with a fresh
demonstration of aggression and call it peace. Man as a Xation and
Man as an individual are both 'Man' and the Nation is only man in a
group; but in the latter we can often see in history causes and effects
working out which cannot be seen in the former. In that longer view,
we can see how the reaping always follows the sowing, and that Nature
allows no evasions, but exacts the bill to the uttermost - insists on the
evil done being 'zrndone,' however painfully to the doer.
In the larger issues of national life, we are perhaps beginning to
.