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Testimonies for the Church Volume 4
them from the degradation of the Fall. Christ’s experience is for our
benefit. His example in overcoming appetite points out the way for
those who would be His followers and finally sit with Him on His
throne.
Christ suffered hunger in the fullest sense. Mankind generally have
all that is needful to sustain life. And yet, like our first parents, they
desire that which God would withhold because it is not best for them.
Christ suffered hunger for necessary food and resisted the temptation
of Satan upon the point of appetite. Indulgence of intemperate ap-
petite creates in fallen man unnatural desires for the things which will
eventually prove his ruin.
Man came from the hand of God perfect in every faculty of mind
and body; in perfect soundness, therefore in perfect health. It took
more than two thousand years of indulgence of appetite and lustful
passions to create such a state of things in the human organism as
would lessen vital force. Through successive generations the tendency
was more swiftly downward. Indulgence of appetite and passion
combined led to excess and violence; debauchery and abominations of
every kind weakened the energies and brought upon the race diseases
of every type, until the vigor and glory of the first generations passed
away, and, in the third generation from Adam, man began to show
signs of decay. Successive generations after the Flood degenerated
more rapidly.
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All this weight of woe and accumulated suffering can be traced to
the indulgence of appetite and passion. Luxurious living and the use of
wine corrupt the blood, inflame the passions, and produce diseases of
every kind. But the evil does not end here. Parents leave maladies as a
legacy to their children. As a rule, every intemperate man who rears
children transmits his inclinations and evil tendencies to his offspring;
he gives them disease from his own inflamed and corrupted blood.
Licentiousness, disease, and imbecility are transmitted as an inheri-
tance of woe from father to son and from generation to generation, and
this brings anguish and suffering into the world, and is no less than a
repetition of the fall of man.
A continual transgression of nature’s laws is a continual transgres-
sion of the law of God. The present weight of suffering and anguish
which we see everywhere, the present deformity, decrepitude, disease,
and imbecility now flooding the world, make it, in comparison to what