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Effect of Obedience to Prophetic Commands |
The bearing on health of these commands relating to the
simple life, hygiene, abstinence from alcohol and opium, etcetera,
is too obvious to call for much comment, although
their vital importance is apt to be greatly underestimated.
Were they to be generally observed, most of the infectious diseases
and a good many others would soon vanish from among
men. The amount of illness caused by neglect of simple hygienic
precautions and by indulgence in alcohol and opium is
prodigious. Moreover, obedience to these commands would
not only affect health, but would have an enormous effect for
good on character and conduct. Alcohol and opium affect a
man’s conscience long before they affect his gait or cause obvious
bodily disease, so that the moral spiritual gain from
abstinence would be even greater than the physical. With regard
to cleanliness, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says:—“External cleanliness,
although it is but a physical thing, has great influence
upon spirituality. … The fact of having a pure and spotless
body exercises an influence upon the spirit of man.”
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Were the commands of the Prophets concerning chastity in
sexual relations generally observed, another fertile cause of
disease would be eliminated. The loathsome venereal diseases,
which wreck the health of so many thousands today, innocent
as well as guilty, babes as well as parents, would very soon be
entirely a thing of the past.
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Were the commands of the Prophets concerning justice, mutual
aid, loving one’s neighbor as oneself, carried out, how
could overcrowding, sweated labor and sordid poverty on the
one hand, together with self-indulgence, idleness and sordid
luxury on the other, continue to work mental, moral and
physical ruin?
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Simple obedience to the hygienic and moral commands of
Moses, Buddha, Christ, Muḥammad or Bahá’u’lláh would do
more in the way of preventing disease than all the doctors and
all the public health regulations in the world have been able to
accomplish. In fact, it seems certain that were such obedience
general, good health would also become general. Instead of
lives being blighted by disease of cut off in infancy, youth or
prime, as so frequently happens now, men would live to a ripe
old age, like sound fruits that mature and mellow ere they drop
from the bough.
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