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the life processes may be improved in tone, producing solider and more perfect specimens of the race. The resultant men and women will average to live more years owing to the care exercised. Each year they stay on earth will be happier. They will be more efficient and useful. They will impose less care and expense upon friends. Their fellowmen dealing with them will find the converse pleasanter. Offspring, if any, will be worthier to exist.

Health is important that we may live, think, feel and act strongly so long as we live, think, feel and act at all. To say that life ought to be is equivalent to saying that it ought to be as whole and virile as it may. If we are puny and ailing, unless the defect springs from causes beyond our control, we are guilty. Let life be short if it must, but let it be full. While our blood runs let it run red and swiftly. Men and women who mostly dawdle might as well be dead. They effect little toward any end for which human existence can have been meant.

Even religion, spirituality, proper prep

aration for heaven, calls for health. The most orthodox nowadays, think saintliness to be of little account unless it is of the active order. Christians, let us hope, more and more incline to model after the Great Saint who went about doing good, rather than after saints who simply sit still and mope, meditate and pray.

In any calling you will find that the active, efficient men, the men who bring things to pass, are those physically the strongest, ablest to work long hours, and yet carry their faculties fresh to the end. Study Congress, for instance; seek out the influential members there and see if the rule announced does not hold. Then go to any of the great trusts or massive businesses characteristic of present industrialism. You will find the leaders to be men of Herculean physical vigor.

Obviously this must be the case more and more as life grows increasingly complex. Massed industry is henceforth the order. To attain important position in any depart

ment of it one must be able to endure like a Titan.

Someone will object that valetudinarians now and then accomplish great things. A few such can no doubt be pointed to; but if you inquire carefully you will in nearly every case find the fact to be about this: Some initial frailty in the man led him to take such excellent care of himself that after a time, though apparently feebler than most, he was really tougher and heartier than most. The occurrence of influential valetudinarians does not disprove our reasoning, but rather confirms it.

Health is an inconceivable aid in intellectual activity. It gives sweep, compass and volume to mental work and mental stores. When perfectly well we learn longer lessons, master each point more easily and thoroughly, and remember better. Brain will not do its best if blood is impure or stagnant. When you are ill the mind wearies easily, mental exertion being a drudgery, and therefore relatively valueless even while it continues. Reasoning be

comes confused, trains of thought needing repetition after repetition in order that you may be sure of them. One reasons well only when one digests well. Mental peristaltic motion waits upon bodily peristaltic motion. Good animality is absolutely indispensable to sane thinking. noblest and most important among mental functions and it is notorious how dependent it is on good bodily condition. How many cranks are so because of lymphatic difficulties!

Judgment is the

Health is needful not alone that we may do with our might what our hands and minds find to do, but also that we may fulfill all our functions with ease, smoothness and grace. Next to vice and crime the greatest curse afflicting humanity's lot is men's crabbedness. How few efficient men are courteous! People are seldom at the same time frank and kind. Some are too cowardly to tell you what they mean; others indeed, keep back nothing, but bellow or bray to you instead of speaking.

This objurgatory temper and manner so

common among men, nearly or quite always has its seat in ill health. Liver, stomach, nerves, the blood-something, some part or function of the physical organism, is out of gear. The fire flies because of grit in the bearings. Even if you make much of men's depravity, alleging that some are grumpy by nature, the evil based primarily not in the body but deeper-in the spirit--you must admit that even in such cases ill health gives it its damning malignancy. The custom of sending medical missionaries along with other missionaries to the heathen world has a significance beyond what appears. health agency is not the veritable Gospel, but it is the Gospel's best possible ally.

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Men need health in order to that inward tranquillity, calm and balance so indispensable to soul growth as well as to physical or mental enterprise. So congested have the avenues of life become in these latter days, that mental poise, serenity, the peace that is like a river, are well-nigh impossible at best, and they are quite so if bodily pains or weaknesses help distract. To commune

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