University of Virginia Library

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 noth- ing 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 flesh- pots of Egypt, feeling childhood's hunger and undisci- plined by self-denial and divine Science.