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(Starvation and dyspepsia)
I knew a person who when quite a child adopted the
Graham system to cure dyspepsia. For many years, he
ate only bread and vegetables, and drank nothing
but water. His dyspepsia increasing, he
decided that his diet should be more rigid, and
thereafter he partook of but one meal in twenty-four
hours, this meal consisting of only a thin slice of bread
without water. His physician also recommended that
he should not wet his parched throat until three hours
after eating. He passed many weary years in hunger
and weakness, almost in starvation, and finally made up
his mind to die, having exhausted the skill of the doctors,
who kindly informed him that death was indeed his only
alternative. At this point Christian Science saved him,
and he is now in perfect health without a vestige of the
old complaint.
He learned that suffering and disease were the self-imposed
beliefs of mortals, and not the facts of being;
that God never decreed disease, - never ordained a law
that fasting should be a means of health. Hence semi-starvation
is not acceptable to wisdom, and it is equally
far from Science, in which being is sustained by God, Mind.
These truths, opening his eyes, relieved his stomach, and
he ate without suffering, "giving God thanks;" but he
never enjoyed his food as he had imagined he would
when, still the slave of matter, he thought of the fleshpots
of Egypt, feeling childhood's hunger and undisciplined
by self-denial and divine Science.
(Mind and stomach)
This new-born understanding, that neither food nor
the stomach, without the consent of mortal
mind, can make one suffer, brings with it another
lesson, - that gluttony is a sensual illusion, and
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