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Extremes in Health Reform
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after all they do not learn anything, but will go on just as sanguine
in the next case, observing the same rigid treatment. Some persons
may have a power of constitution sufficient to withstand the terrible
tax imposed upon them, and live. Then the novices take the glory to
themselves, when none is due them. Everything is due to God and
to a powerful constitution.
Brother C has been occupying an unworthy position in standing
as a prop for B. He has been mind for him, and has stood by to
sustain and back him up. These two men are fanatics on the subject
of health reform. Brother C knows much less than he thinks he does.
He is deceived in himself. He is selfish and bigoted in carrying out
his views; he is not teachable. He has not had a subdued will. He
is not a man of humble mind. Such a man has no business to be a
physician. He may have gained some little knowledge by reading,
but this is not enough. Experience is necessary. Our people are too
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few to be sacrificed so cheaply and ingloriously as to submit to being
experimented upon by such men. Altogether too many precious ones
would fall a sacrifice to their rigid views and notions before they
would give up, confess their errors, and learn wisdom by experience.
Brother C is too set and willful, and too unteachable for the Lord
to use to do any special work in His cause. He is too stubborn to
let a few sacrificed lives change his course. He would maintain his
views and notions all the more earnestly. These men will yet learn to
their sorrow that they might better be teachable, and not drive their
extreme views, whatever the result may be. The community will be
just as well off, and a little safer upon the whole, if both these men
obtain employment in some other business where life and health
will not be endangered by their course of action.
It is a great responsibility to take the life of a human being in
hand. And to have that precious life sacrificed through mismanage-
ment is dreadful. The case of Brother D’s family is terrible. These
men may excuse their course; but that will not save the cause of God
from reproach, nor bring back that son who suffered and died for
the want of food. A little good wine and food would have brought
him up from a bed of death and given him back to his family. The
father also would soon have been numbered with the dead if the
same course had been continued which had been pursued toward the