A Reform Needed
[
The Review and Herald, May 27, 1902
.]
If Seventh-day Adventists practiced what they profess to believe,
if they were sincere health reformers, they would indeed be a spectacle
to the world, to angels, and to men. And they would show a far greater
zeal for the salvation of those who are ignorant of the truth.
Greater reforms should be seen among the people who claim to be
looking for the soon appearing of Christ. Health reform is to do among
our people a work which it has not yet done. There are those who
ought to be awake to the danger of meat eating, who are still eating the
flesh of animals, thus endangering the physical, mental, and spiritual
health. Many who are now only half converted on the question of meat
eating will go from God’s people, to walk no more with them.
In all our work we must obey the laws which God has given, that
the physical and spiritual energies may work in harmony. Men may
have a form of godliness, they may even preach the gospel, and yet be
unpurified and unsanctified. Ministers should be strictly temperate in
their eating and drinking, lest they make crooked paths for their feet,
turning the lame—those weak in the faith—out of the way. If, while
proclaiming the most solemn and important message God has ever
given, men war against the truth by indulging wrong habits of eating
and drinking, they take all the force from the message they bear.
Evils of Flesh Eating
Those who indulge in meat eating, tea drinking, and gluttony are
sowing seeds for a harvest of pain and death. The unhealthful food
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placed in the stomach strengthens the appetites that war against the
soul, developing the lower propensities. A diet of flesh meat tends to
develop animalism. A development of animalism lessens spirituality,
rendering the mind incapable of understanding truth.
The word of God plainly warns us that unless we abstain from
fleshly lusts, the physical nature will be brought into conflict with the
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