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The Fundamentals But God, having imparted physical life to His creatures, has also made ample provision for the maintenance of that life, by supplying through the inscrutable synthesis carried on un- ceasingly by the vegetable kingdom, abundant food, capable, when taken into the body and properly assimilated, of supply- ing the waste that is constantly in progress in every part of the body, and of maintaining the strength thereof. Furthermore, if the conversion of minerals into food-stuff by the members of the vegetable kingdom is a process dis- playing the marvelous wisdom of God, the process of digestion and nutrition is not less so. Nothing could be more improbable than that food, taken into the body by way of the mouth, should, without any attention or supervision from the tenant of that body, be digested, the valuable parts separated from the worthless, the latter discharged from the body, the former converted into tissue, muscle, bone, sinew, nerve-cell, blood- corpuscle, hair, nails, etc., and distributed automatically throughout the body, each to the place requiring it, and all in due proportion. In this we have again a process far transcending the com- prehension of the most learned men, who must eat and be nourished like other men, and who are equally ignorant of the process whereby their lives are sustained, and whereby they gain the strength which they use to deny God and glorify man. J Men boast in these days of their “independence,” and make much of “self-reliance.” But this is the height of presump- tuous folly; for man is a most helplessly dependent creature, not even able, like the plant, to prepare his own food from the mineral elements, but dependent daily upon living creatures much lower than himself in the scale of being. And so far from having a basis for self-reliance, he does not know how to conduct the simplest of the vital processes of his own body. If his Creator, of whom principally man loves to fancy himself independent, should turn over to him the operation of the least
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