Physical Disasters Compounded By Mental Disturbances

The physical tragedies follow the continued use of intoxicating beverages. But the mental, moral, and spiritual disasters are more tragic and more terrible still. By disturbing the healthy condition of the brain, which is the physical organ through which the mind acts, you disrupt your mind. Yet, problems with your mind are more difficult to notice than physical complications.

Lack of rational control over impulses and passions always accompanies mental disturbances.

Heavenly order in the body

The human mind must acknowledge specific general laws or principles, or else it fumbles with the truth. For proper understanding, we assume, as a general truth—health in the human body is natural to cosmic order on the physical plane of life. Any disturbance of that order exposes humans to destructive influences, evil and infernal in their character. Above the natural and physical plane, and resting upon it, while man lives in this world, is the mental and spiritual plane, or degree of life. This degree is in heavenly order when reason is apparent, and the appetites and passions remain under intelligent control. When this delicate equipoise is disturbed or lost, an influx of more subtle evil overwhelms the heart and soul in a way that physical developments can never accomplish. Mental disturbances have the power to act upon reason and passions as something that obscures the one and inflames the others.

Bodily health often results in mental disturbance. A disease that remains remote from the brain generates only a slight irritation in our thought processes. However, when sickness presses nearer to the brain, it affects our character, temperament, and inherited disposition. But most consistently, mental disturbances rise in a manner that enables evil predominance over our life and thoughts. We get fretful, disagreeable, or selfish. Maybe we endure mental obscurity or issue unreasonable demands on others. Our words and attitude become vicious and cruel propensities.

Yet the undisturbed brain holds held rule with patience and loving-kindness. Suppose the disease which has attacked the brain goes on increasing. Then mental disruptions increase and show up as organic disturbance or deterioration in our thinking. Insanity, or one of the many ignored sad and varied forms, looms near and deadly.

Insanity

Therefore, it is a dire thing for a man to take into his body any substance which, on reaching that wonderfully delicate organ, sets up a diseased activity therein. A fever is a fever, whether it be light or intensely burning. So any disturbance of the mind’s rational equipoise is insanity, whether in the simplest form of temporary obscurity or the midnight of a darkened intellect.

We are not writing in the interest of any particular theory, nor the spirit of partisanship, but with an earnest desire to make the truth appear.

As to this matter of insanity, think calmly. Hearing the term applied toward self delivers a shock to our senses. We listen almost involuntarily, then thank God for the excellent gift of a well-balanced mind.

If for any cause this beautiful equipoise should be disturbed and the mind lose the power to think clearly or hold the lower passions in due control? Shall we exceed the truth if we say that the person in whom this occurs is insane just to the degree that they lost rational self-control, but they are healed when returns?

In this view, the question as to the hurtfulness of alcoholic drinks assumes a new and graver aspect. Do they disturb the brain when they come in contact with its substance; and deteriorate it if the contact be long continued? Fact, observation, experience and scientific investigation all emphatically say yes; and we know that if the brain be disordered the mind, will be disordered, likewise; and a disordered mind is an insane mind. Clearly, then, in the degree that a man impairs or hurts his brain temporarily or continuously in that degree his mind is unbalanced; in that degree he is not a truly rational and sane man.

We are holding your thought just here that you may have time to think, and to look at the question in the light of reason and common sense. So far as he does this, will he be able to feel the force of such evidence as we shall educe in what follows, and to comprehend its true meaning.

Other substances besides alcohol act injuriously on the brain; but there is none that compares with this in the extent, variety and diabolical aspect of the mental aberrations which follow its use. We are not speaking thoughtlessly or wildly; but simply uttering a truth well-known to every man of observation, and which every man, and especially those who take this substance in any form, should, lay deeply to heart. Why it is that such awful and destructive forms of insanity should follow, as they do, the use of alcohol it is not for us to say. That they do follow it, we know, and we hold, up the fact in solemn warning.

Another consideration, which should have weight with every one, is this, that no man can tell what may be the character of the legacy he has received from his ancestors. He may have an inheritance of latent evil forces, transmitted through many generations, which only await some favoring opportunity to spring into life and action. So long as he maintains a rational self-control, and the healthy order of his life be not disturbed, they may continue quiescent; but if his brain loses its equipoise, or is hurt or impaired, then a diseased psychical condition may be induced and the latent evil forces be quickened into life.