The Harvest of Health

In recent observations we have arrived at an awareness that old age is the harvest of the years of youth; that each part of life is as natural as all others, and all make a complete picture. And one of the most valued of the harvests of life is health. We cannot always assure it unto ourselves. There are accidents and uncontrolled illnesses. But we are more likely to have health as part of our harvest, if we are aware of its value early in the years of youth. Herbert Spencer significantly said: “The preservation of health is a duty. Few seem conscious that there is such a thing as physical morality.” Health is a great matter…” said Thomas Carlyle, “for does not health mean harmony, the synonym of all that is true, justly-ordered, good…”² And then to his students at Edinburgh University he said: “Finally, Gentlemen, I have one advice to give you,… remember the care of health. I have no doubt you have among you young souls ardently bent to consider life cheap, for the purpose of getting forward in what they are aiming at of high; but you are to consider, that health is a thing to be attended to continually; …What to it are nuggets and millions? The French financier said, ‘Why, is there no sleep to be sold!'”³ — to which he might have added also: Why, is there no health to be sold? “My father early gave me to understand,” said Samuel A. Eliot, son of Harvard’s Charles Eliot, “That a sound and serviceable body was essential for a happy and productive life.”⁴ Yet youth sometimes abuses health as it abuses time — thinking that it will always be available. But the dissipations and excesses of youth, or of any age, are paid for surely and certainly. And it is not only the curing of the sick that is so essential, but teaching the well to stay well, the healthy to stay healthy and physically fit. And no one wisely would ever suppose that he has a moral right to abuse himself or impair his physical functioning with any bad habit, with any dissipation, with any excesses, with any injurious substances, or anything that dulls the senses. The doing or the taking of anything which impairs the best chances for health and happiness is in itself a kind of sin, because it takes the irreplaceable from us and others, and abuses one of the greatest gifts that God has given. All men should live to enjoy what “God hath ordained… for the constitution, nature and use of man… with prudence and thanksgiving [that they may] …find wisdom and great treasures of knowledge… and… run and not be weary, and… walk and not faint.”⁵ — and live the fullest possible measure of life in health and happiness.