[Gutenberg 52992] • Food and Morals / 6th Edition

Gentlemen:—I have read with great interest a sermon by Rev. Mr. Clymer, of Auburn, on “The Relation of Food to Morals,” as it appeared in the Auburn Daily Advertiser of June 20th, 1880. Certainly everything stands related to morals; and all men, women, and children should be made to see and feel this.

I suppose I am considered an old-fashioned preacher. I believe in “original sin,” and I believe in a great deal of sin that is not original. I believe that every man is so corrupt that he can never be made pure without supernatural influence; and I believe that he must take advantage, at the same time, of all the natural helps. Even the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ cannot make the saint who is in the flesh, feel alert and happy, so long as he has any serious obstruction of the biliary duct. When I was a younger pastor in a Southern city, I was called by a mother to see her daughter, a girl of eighteen, who was in a dreadful way, inconsolably laboring under the oppressive feeling that there was no mercy for her. I prescribed for her torpid liver as my knowledge of the healing art enabled me to do, promising to call again soon. When I did call, the young lady was relieved, and I was able to secure her attention to the comfortable truths of our most holy faith. It is first the natural, and then the spiritual; St. Paul, 1 Cor. xv. 46: “Howbeit that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual.” We must always feel our dependence on the spirit of God for our regeneration and sanctification, but not in such a way as to make fools of us. The man whose faith in the supernatural makes him depreciate the natural, has no more sense than he whose faith in the natural utterly excludes super-nature.

I think you would do a good work to issue Mr. Clymer’s discourse as one of a series of tracts proclaiming the gospel of hygiene. Will you not do it?

With kindest regards, yours truly