Seite 40 - Christian Temperance and Bible Hygiene (1890)

Das ist die SEO-Version von Christian Temperance and Bible Hygiene (1890). Klicken Sie hier, um volle Version zu sehen

« Vorherige Seite Inhalt Nächste Seite »
36
Christian Temperance and Bible Hygiene
One of the strongest temptations that man has to meet is upon the
point of appetite. In the beginning the Lord made man upright. He
was created with a perfectly balanced mind, the size and strength of
all his organs being fully and harmoniously developed. But through
the seductions of the wily foe, the prohibition of God was disregarded,
and the laws of nature wrought out their full penalty.
Adam and Eve were permitted to eat of all the trees in their Eden
home, save one. The Lord said to the holy pair, “In the day that ye
eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, ye shall surely die.”
[See
Genesis 3
.] Eve was beguiled by the serpent, and made to believe
that God would not do as he had said. She ate, and thinking she
felt the sensation of a new and more exalted life, she bore the fruit
to her husband. The serpent had said that she should not die, and
she felt no ill effects from eating the fruit,—nothing which could be
interpreted to mean death, but, instead, a pleasurable sensation, which
she imagined was as the angels felt. Her experience stood arrayed
against the positive command of Jehovah, yet Adam permitted himself
to be seduced by it.
Thus we often find it, even in the religious world. God’s express
commands are transgressed; and “because sentence against an evil
work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is
fully set in them to do the evil.” [
Ecclesiastes 8:11
.] In the face of the
most positive commands of God, men and women will follow their
own inclinations, and then dare to pray over the matter, to prevail upon
God to allow them to go contrary to his expressed will. Satan comes to
the side of such persons, as he did to Eve in Eden, and impresses them.
They have an exercise of mind, and this they relate as a most wonderful
[43]
experience which the Lord has given them. But true experience will be
in harmony with natural and divine law; false experience arrays itself
against the laws of life and the precepts of Jehovah.
Since the first surrender to appetite, mankind have been growing
more and more self-indulgent, until health has been sacrificed on
the altar of appetite. The inhabitants of the antediluvian world were
intemperate in eating and drinking. They would have flesh-meats,
although God had at that time given man no permission to eat animal
food. They ate and drank till the indulgence of their depraved appetite
knew no bounds, and they became so corrupt that God could bear with