Earlier text: EXTRACTS FROM HIS LECTURES.“If a young man, incited by selfish principles alone, inquires how he shall make his appetite yield him the largest amount of gratification, the answer is, by Temperance. The true epicurean art consists in the adaptation of our organs, not only to the highest, but to the longest enjoyment. Vastly less depends upon the table to which we sit down, than upon the appetite which we carry to it. The palled epicure, who spends five dollars for his dinner, extracts less pleasure from his meal than many a hardy laborer who dines for a shilling. The desideratum is, not greater luxuries, but livelier papillæ; and if the devotee of appetite would propitiate his divinity aright, he would not send to the Yellowstone for buffaloes’ tongues, nor to France for pate de fois gras, but would climb a mountain, or swing an ax. With health, there is no end to the quantity or the variety from which the palate can extract its pleasures. Without health, no delicacy that nature or art produces can provoke a zest. Hence, when a man destroys his health, he destroys, so far as he is concerned, whatever of sweetness, of flavor and of savor, the teeming earth can produce. To him who has poisoned his appetite by excesses, the luscious pulp of grape or peach, the nectareous juices of orange or pine-apple, are but a loathing and a nausea. He has turned gardens and groves of delicious fruit into gardens and groves of ipecac and aloes. The same vicious indulgences that blasted his health, blasted all orchards and cane-fields also. Verily, the man who is physiologically “wicked,” does not live out half his days; nor is this the worst of his punishment, for he is more than half dead while he appears to live. “Let the young man, then, remember, that, for every offense which he commits against the laws of45 health, nature will bring him into judgment. However graciously God may deal with the heart, all our experience proves that he never pardons stomach, muscles, lungs or brain. These must expiate their offenses un-vicariously. Nay, there are numerous and obvious cases of violated physical laws, where Nature with all her diligence and severity, seems unable to scourge the offender enough during his life-time, and so she goes on plying her scourge upon his children and his children’s children after him, even to the third and fourth generation. The punishment is entailed on posterity; nor human law, nor human device can break the entailment. And in these hereditary inflictions, nature abhors alike the primogeniture laws of England, and the Salic laws of France. All the sons and all the daughters are made inheritors; not in aliquot parts; but, by a kind of malignant multiplication in the distemper, each inherits the whole. “I ask the young man, then, who is just forming his habits of life, or just beginning to indulge those habitual trains of thought out of which habits grow, to look around him, and mark the examples whose fortune he would covet, or whose fate he would abhor. Even as we walk the streets, we meet with exhibitions of each extreme. Here, behold a patriarch, whose stock of vigor three-score years and ten seem hardly to have impaired. His erect form, his firm step, his elastic limbs, and undimmed senses, are so many certificates of good conduct; or, rather, so many jewels and orders of nobility with which nature has honored him for his fidelity to her laws. His fair complexion shows that his blood has never been corrupted; his pure breath, that he has never yielded his digestive apparatus for a vintner’s cess-pool; his exact language and keen apprehension, that his brain has never been drugged or stupefied by the poisons of distiller or tobacconist. Enjoying his appetites to the highest, he has preserved the power of enjoying them. Despite the moral of the school-boy’s story, he has eaten his cake and still kept it. As he drains the cup of life, there are no lees at the bottom. His organs will reach the goal of existence together. Painlessly as a46 candle burns down in its socket, so will he expire; and a little imagination would convert him into another Enoch, translated from earth to a better world without the sting of death. “But look at an opposite extreme, where an opposite history is recorded. What wreck so shocking to behold as the wreck of a dissolute man;—the vigor of life exhausted, and yet the first steps in an honorable career not taken; in himself a lazarhouse of diseases; dead, but, by a heathenish custom of society, not yet buried! Rogues have had the initial letter of their title burnt into the palms of their hands; even for murder, Cain was only branded on the forehead; but over the whole person of the debauchee or the inebriate, the signatures of infamy are written. How nature brands him with stigma and opprobrium! How she hangs labels all over him, to testify her disgust at his existence, and to admonish others to beware of his example! How she loosens all his joints, sends tremors along his muscles, and bends forward his frame, as if to bring him upon all fours with kindred brutes, or to degrade him to the reptile’s crawling! How she disfigures his countenance, as if intent upon obliterating all traces of her own image, so that she may sware she never made him! How she pours rheum over his eyes, sends foul spirits to inhabit his breath, and shrieks, as with a trumpet, from every pore of his body, ‘BEHOLD A BEAST!’ Such a man may be seen in the streets of our cities every day; if rich enough, he may be found in the saloons, and at the tables of the ‘Upper Ten;’ but surely, to every man of purity and honor, to every man whose wisdom as well as whose heart is unblemished, the wretch who comes cropped and bleeding from the pillory, and redolent with its appropriate perfumes, would be a guest or a companion far less offensive and disgusting. “Now let the young man, rejoicing in his manly proportions, and in his comeliness, look on this picture and on that, and then say, after the likeness of which model he intends his own erect stature and sublime countenance shall be configured. “Society is infinitely too tolerant of the roue,—the47 wretch whose life-long pleasure it has been to debase himself and to debauch others; whose heart has been spotted with infamy so much, that it is no longer spotted, but hell-black all over; and who, at least, deserves to be treated as travelers say the wild horses of the prairies treat a vicious fellow,—the noblest of the herd forming a compact circle around him, heads outward, and kicking him to death. “But why should not a young man indulge an ambition to lay up a stock of health, as well as to lay up stocks of any other kind? Health is earned,—as literally so, as any commodity in the market. Health can be accumulated, invested, made to yield its interest, and its compound interest, and thus be doubled and redoubled. The capital of health, indeed, may all be forfeited by one physical misdemeanor, as a rich man may sink all his property in one bad speculation; but it is as capable of being increased as any other kind of capital; and it can be safely insured, on payment of the reasonable premium of temperance and forethought. This, too, is a species of wealth which is not only capable of a life-long enjoyment by its possessor, but it may be transmitted to children by a will and testament that no human judicature can set aside. “Why, too, should not a young man be ambitious to amass a capital of health upon which he can draw, in cases of emergency, without danger of bankruptcy, or even of protest? Suppose, in the course of life, some brilliant achievement should be offered for his winning,—some literary or scientific labor, or some victory over the leagued forces of vice, or error, or ignorance,—which might demand for its triumph a double amount of exertion, for months, or for years;—then, when he feels that he can do a day’s work every day, and another day’s work every night, and still live as long and enjoy as much as his fellows, will he not experience a delight in the consciousness of his power, a thousand times more vivid and more pure than a capitalist can ever feel over his funds, or a miser over his hoards? And is not this a legitimate satisfaction; nay, a lofty and honorable ambition, to which a true man may properly aspire?” The Old Age of a Temperate Man.
LEWIS CARNARO, a Venetian nobleman, memorable for having lived to an extreme old age, he being 105 years old at the time of his death, wrote a treatise on “the advantages of a temperate life.” He was induced, it appears, to compose this at the request, and for the instruction of some ingenious young men, for whom he had a regard; who, seeing him, then eighty-one years old, in a fine state of health, were extremely desirous to be made acquainted with the means by which he had been enabled to preserve the vigor of his mind and body to so advanced an age. He describes to them, accordingly, his whole manner of living, and the regimen he invariably pursued. He states, that when he was young he was very intemperate—that his intemperance had brought upon him many and grievous disorders; that from his thirty-fifth to his fortieth year, he spent his days and nights in the utmost anxiety and pain—and that, in short, his life had become a burden to him. His physicians, after many fruitless attempts to restore him to health, told him, that there was but one medicine remaining, which had not yet been tried; but which, if he could but prevail upon himself to use with perseverance, would free him from all his complaints—and that was, a regular and temperate plan of life. Upon this, he immediately prepared himself for his new regimen, and confined himself to a very moderate portion of plain and wholesome food. This diet was at first very disagreeable to him, and he longed to return again to his former mode of living. Occasionally, indeed, without the knowledge of his physicians, he did indulge himself in a greater freedom of diet; but, as he informs us, much to his own uneasiness and detriment. Compelled by necessity, and exerting resolutely all the powers of his mind, he became, at length, confirmed in a settled and uninterrupted course of the strictest temperance; by virtue of which, as he states, all his disorders had left him in less than a year, and he enjoyed, subsequently, perfect and uninterrupted health. Some sensualists, it appears, had objected to his mode49 of living—insisting that it was useless to mortify one’s appetites as he did, for the sake of becoming old, since all that remained of life after the age of sixty-five, could not properly be called vita viva, sed vita mortua—not a living, but a dead life. “Now,” he says, “to show these gentlemen how much they are mistaken, I will briefly run over the satisfactions and pleasures which I now enjoy in this eighty-third year of my age. In the first place, I am always well, and so active withal, that I can with ease mount a horse upon a flat, and walk to the top of very high mountains. In the next place, I am always cheerful, pleasant, perfectly contented, and free from all perturbation, and every unpleasant thought. Joy and peace have so firmly fixed their residence in my bosom, as never to depart from it. I have none of that satiety of life so often to be met with in persons of my age, for I am enabled to spend every hour of my time with the greatest delight and pleasure. I frequently converse with men of talent and learning, and spend much of my time in reading and writing. I have another way of diverting myself—by going every spring and autumn to enjoy, for some days an eminence which I possess in the most beautiful part of the Euganian hills, adorned with fountains and gardens; and above all, a convenient and handsome lodge, in which place I also, now and then, make one in some hunting party, suitable to my taste and age. At the same seasons of every year, I revisit some of the neighboring cities, and enjoy the company of such of my friends as live there, and through them the conversation of men of other parts, who reside in those places—such as architects, painters, sculptors, musicians, and husbandmen. I visit their new works; I revisit their former ones, and always learn something which gives me satisfaction. I see the palaces, gardens, antiquities; and with these the squares and other public places, the churches, the fortifications—leaving nothing unobserved from which I may reap either entertainment or instruction. But what delights me most is, in my journeys backward and forward, to contemplate the situation and other beauties of the places I pass through—some in the50 plain, others on hills, adjoining to rivers or fountains—with numerous beautiful houses and gardens. Nor are my recreations rendered less agreeable and entertaining by my not seeing well, or not hearing readily everything that is said to me—or by any other of my senses not being perfect; for they are all, thank God, in the highest perfection, particularly my palate, which now relishes better the simple fare I meet with wherever I happen to be, than it did formerly the most delicate dishes, when I led an irregular life. I sleep, too, everywhere soundly and quietly—and all my dreams are pleasant and delightful. “These are the delights and comforts of my old age, from which I presume, that the life I spend is not a dead, morose, and melancholy one; but a living, active, and pleasant existence, which I would not change with the most robust of those youths who indulge and riot in all the luxury of the senses; because I know them to be exposed to a thousand diseases, a thousand unavoidable sources of unhappiness, and a thousand kinds of death. I, on the contrary, am free from all such apprehensions—from the apprehension of disease, because I have nothing for disease to feed upon—from the apprehensions of death, because I have lived a life of reason. Besides I am persuaded, death is not yet near me. I know that barring accidents, no violent disease can touch me. I must be dissolved by a gentle and gradual decay, when the radical moisture is consumed, like oil in a lamp, which affords no longer life to the dying taper.” THERE is no fact more clearly established in the physiology of man, than this, that the brain expands its energies and itself during the hours of wakefulness, and that these are recuperated during sleep; if the recuperation does not equal the expenditure, the brain withers; this is insanity. Thus it is, that in early English history, persons who were condemned to death by being prevented from sleeping, always died raving51 maniacs; thus it is, also, that those who are starved to death become insane; the brain is not nourished, and they cannot sleep. The practical inferences are these: First, those who think most, who do most brainwork, require most sleep. Second, that time saved from necessary sleep is infallibly destructive to mind, body, and estate. Third, give yourselves, your children, your servants—give all that are under you—the fullest amount of sleep they will take, by compelling them to go to bed at some regular hour, and to rise in the morning the moment they awake; and within a fortnight, nature, with almost the regularity of the rising sun, will unloose the bonds of sleep the moment enough repose has been secured for the wants of the system. This is the only safe and sufficient rule—and as to the question how much sleep one requires, each must be a rule to himself—great Nature will never fail to write it out to the observer under the regulations just given.—Dr. Spicer. Valuable Extracts:
GATHERED FROM THE LAWS OF LIFE.
“ABOUT DIET AND OTHER THINGS.—The writer of the following letter wished an answer, and as she did not give her name, I can only reply through the Laws, which is perhaps as well. “I have long felt the necessity of light, to enable me to do my duty in my family as a mother, and have now commenced reading the ‘Laws of Life.’ It seems to me if I could be convinced of what is the best food and drink for my children, I would furnish it to them. Thus far I have tried to please their tastes, perhaps more than any thing else. If I should keep them on two meals a day, and those consisting of Graham bread and pudding, they would think mother was really cruel. However I think I could get along with that, but what should I do with my friends when they come to visit me? Our relatives, with multitudes of52 others, visit us, expecting something good to eat, of course, and I, of course, have had a little pride in getting them something rather extra. If I were very poor I could say that I could not get the means to treat company as I wish, and I should be excused; but if I should say I have changed my manner of living for the sake of health, I should be asked no doubt, ‘Where did you get your directions?’ and if I should reply, ‘From the Laws of Life,’ they would probably say to me—‘I am astonished that you should take that Journal! Don’t you know that the editors are infidels?’ &c. “You are aware, no doubt, that people will say what they choose, but still I do not care so much about that, as I do to know and do what is right. I had about made up my mind that it was as well to eat temperately of all the good things of earth, as any way, but have not been really satisfied with the idea after all. I looked in the paper to see if I could find any recipes for Graham bread, pudding, crackers, &c., but could not find any. Would it be asking too much of you to print some of these recipes in your paper? If we are to have but two meals a day, what hours are we to take those meals at?” “This mother already sees the result of the practice of endeavoring to please the tastes of her children. The more a child or grown person does this, the more fickle will the appetite become, and nothing but the richest foods, and a great variety at that, will satisfy. Is it not really more cruel to children, to cherish so false and morbid an appetite in them, and be constantly indulging them, than to keep them to simple food, thus cultivating in them a relish for the plainest and most wholesome dishes? Mothers must be their own judges of their conduct toward their children, and not allow the children to judge for them. “In regard to the entertainment of friends, I think it quite right that they should have such dishes placed before them as will enable them to get along comfortably and pleasantly. Still I should not care to have friends visit me with the sole object of getting something53 good to eat. Though articles are placed upon the table which are not considered proper to eat ordinarily, the children will not be likely to be troubled by them, if the parents set them a good example, and keep to their accustomed diet. This I think may be done without any offense whatever to visitors, particularly when they are told that it is for ‘conscience’ sake. If they ask how the conscience comes to be quickened on those points, there need be no hesitation in replying that it is by reading the Laws of Life, for I should hope that no person, who has read this Journal three months in succession, could fail to understand that we are not infidels, but are Christians,—not only theoretically, but that, at least, we earnestly aim to be such in our daily lives and conversation, and in the advocacy of the Health Reform.” FOOD.—The combinations of cookery are exceedingly unhealthy, and provoke disease to a great degree. The kitchen and the drug-shop, the cook and the doctor, are co-workers. One furnishes capital, the other trades upon it. If you would have long life in the land, you must simplify your tastes. No stomach can stand the drafts made on it by modern cookery, and this the doctors know right well. Add to this that the nerves of taste act healthily on simply-prepared food, and so make all the special senses acute, while complicated and rich food prevents their action, and so deadens them. It is a fact worthy attention, that very few young men—to say nothing of older men—have unperverted taste. They cannot discern the natural qualities of substances unless under strong appeals to the organs exercised. The power to discriminate delicately is gone. And what is true of the sense of taste is equally true of the other four senses. Highly-seasoned food, hot drinks, the use of snuff, smoking, drinking spirituous liquors, use of flesh-meats, constant and uninterrupted use of condiments—salt, pepper, spices, etc.—all help to break down the discriminative power of smell, sight, hearing, and touch. Man, who has his reason to aid him as an animal, and therefore is bound within the compass of his animal54 nature to excel animals lower than himself, is greatly their inferior. In a large degree this is owing to perversion, and lies within the compass of his sensual indulgences. I speak to you positively, because I am conversant with both sides of the question practically. In my own person I have felt the effects; in the persons of others I have observed the effects. Take the senses under cultivation and arrange dietetic relations with them. On the one side treat them with the following daily bill of fare, and watch the result: “BREAKFAST.—Ham and eggs or beef-steak, pork-steak, mutton-chop or chicken, potatoes, pickles, pepper, mustard, vinegar, salt, and catsup, hot rolls, raised bread, buckwheat cakes (hot) butter, and molasses, tea or coffee, chocolate, milk, and sugar. “DINNER.—Boiled victuals, consisting of pork, beef, potatoes, parsnips, carrots, beets, and turnips. “Roast-beef or boiled mutton, pot-pie, chicken-pie, or cold boiled ham, with vegetables salt as the ocean, and saturated with old butter. Dessert: mince-pie, whose crust is lard, and salt, with a little flour stirred in and baked—and called pastry. Supper.—Tea and toast, hot biscuit, butter-cake, cheese, cold and sliced meat, mustard, salt, pepper, vinegar, sugar, and milk. “INCIDENTALS—under medical advisement.—Salts or senna, castor-oil or pills, blue and black; calomel, jalap, opium, Dovers’ powder, morphine, arsenic, quinine, podophyllin, lobelia, strychnine, colchicum, dog’s liver, rattlesnake’s poison, whiskey, brandy, gin, gums, resins, pitches, turpentines, essences, essential oils, blisters, burning, or scarifications to the skin. “Admirable arrangement! Does it not appear so to you? A horse thus treated would have his sight, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling rendered perfect; do you not think he would? That you have the catarrh at eighteen, and cannot tell by smell a rose from a toad-stool; that at thirty-five you wear spectacles, at forty a wig, at forty-five have not a tooth in your head, unless a dentist has put it there: that at55 fifty your legs are like drum-sticks, and your hands are tremulous with palsy—is not owing to the food you have eaten, and the drinks you have drunken, in your opinion, is it? “Your doctors say for you, ‘that food and medicine are related; that the latter is the jackal to the lion. How can one eat relishable food without the after-clap of unrelishable medicine?’ ‘The ailments you suffer,’ say these wise men, ‘are not caused by your gluttony, your wine-bibbing, and beer-swilling, and your drug-taking, but by God, “Who moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform.” “Such is medical divinity—it is the theology of the still and the stall, and paves the way to the abode of devils till the track is like a turnpike. Now take the other bill of fare.” “Let me run a contrast; Peaches against pork; apples against beef, plums against mutton, strawberries against tallow, cream against lard, unleavened bread against leavened bread, coarse flour against fine, water against tea and coffee, potatoes, peas, beans, against pound-cake and preserves, keen taste, good appetite, against pepper, salt, allspice, cinnamon, cloves, cayenne, and many other things which only the Genius of all evil, habited gastronomically, knows and impels to be mixed with your food. Is not the contrast great? “Oh, heavens! that the fable of Circe should be made good at our tables; that then and there she should work her horrible transformations till you, who ought to be gentlemen, are well nigh swine. If you would but discard the doctors who are dummies, and the dummies who are doctors, and take an upward, open-countenanced look at Nature, one glance of her eye would insure your lives more safely than any bevy of doctors you could gather.” WORK.—If you will live and not die, toil. Are you ashamed of labor? Then I am ashamed of you, and so is God ashamed of you. Next to a sinner who is accursed,56 the Almighty abhors a drone. His benignities, like special favors, like sunlight through a cloudy sky, gather about the head of the worker. Do not be afraid of work. It is honorable, it is refreshing, it is ennobling, enlivening, redemptive. If you are a thinker, work; if heirship to great possessions is yours, work. No matter what pursuit you follow, work; work daily, habitually, persistently, in the open air. Dig dirt. It is a better alterative than any living man carries in his saddle-bag, it regulates the stomach, rouses up the liver, equalizes the circulation, strengthens the muscles, invigorates the mind, calms the passions, purifies the soul, and abjures and exorcises the fiends who haunt men, better than all the medicines invented. It is life, soul, heart, mind, might, and strength to a man, especially if followed by recreation. I do not mean by it playing the fiddle, that is fun; nor selling cloth and measuring tape from behind a counter for ladies, that is employment; nor studying law, that is instruction; nor studying to be a doctor, that might be folly; but I do mean by it that which makes the sweat flow, which makes the muscles like iron, which compels one to fight against the sun till he is tanned nut-brown like a gypsy. “The human being does not live who is not bound by his constitutional laws, obedience to which wraps up his very life, to work the soil he treads till the smell of the earth comes up into his nostrils, more grateful by far than frankincense and myrrh. God is great, and tombstones are his witnesses. God is just, and model men, beautiful women, rosy-cheeked children, are his testimonies. “But working the earth, digging in the ground, is not only necessary to bodily vigor and robust health, it is equally needful to brain—if body and brain may be contra-distinguished. Brain-sweat is the most exhausting sweat; tires out nature quicker, kills sooner than any sudoriferous flow. What steady marchings there are from the ranks of thinkers to the grave! The sound of the bell—tomb! tomb! tomb! is heard at midnight, noon, and at dawn of day. Not because they think, for the brain is made for thought; but because57 they do naught else but think, except in a wrong way. If they knew enough to offset thought by thoughtlessness, care by carelessness, the responsibilities of a man by the ease of the child; if life were industry diversified to them by play instead of hard monotony and dull routine, the benefits would be incalculable. Do NOT TAKE Drugs.—If you are sick, get well by proper means. Be content to get well naturally. If you must die, do so rationally. I should prefer to die rationally than to die scientifically. Death may come, would come, to us all in a manner greatly to be preferred over his present method of approach, if we would let him. We force him to his terrible aspects. We transform him from an angel into a horrible devil. The horrors of the death-bed may be in the physician’s pocket. He drops them into your drink, covers them up in stewed apples, disguises them in liquor, coats them over with sugar. As far as possible he cheats your eye, your ear, your smell, your taste. But all this is a sham. He gives you the horrors. Let alone his poisons if you wish to get well; deal not in his drugs, if you wish to die with a bright eye, a clear mind, a heart at ease and a spirit triumphant.”