Historians have immortalized it in heroic tomes.

Poets have extolled it in great epic verse.

Artists have depicted it in portraiture and tapestry.

Sculptors have expressed it in the life-like stone.

The sick have longed for it.

Saints have prayed for it and, in the search for its fabled, false elixir, alchemists have sacrificed their lives.  It remained for the smug, “sober judgment” of our day to pronounce it “unattainable”—­unattainable!

This, however, is a matter of small moment; for, as Whittier reminds us:  “The falsehoods which we spurn today were the truths of long ago”—­and although men part reluctantly with favorite—­and lucrative—­fallacies, and “Faith, fantastic Faith, once wedded fast to some dear falsehood, hugs it to the last,” nevertheless this false belief, like so many other sapient pronouncements of human wisdom, must be subjected to final reversal.

The ideal state of health is, truly, “unattainable” when we refuse to yield obedience to the simple laws of nature—­when we continuously persist in interference with her work and embarrass her with artificial substitutes, defying her august hygienic precepts by our manner of life.

Not so, however, if we yield to her inducements, fulfil her requirements, and submit ourselves freely to her unerring will.

There is less of fault than of weakness in the fact that so many of us fail to give nature the opportunity to rear us as healthy men and women, to keep us more free than we are from suffering and disease.

Her ways are ways of pleasantness and follow on the lines of the veriest simplicity.

The preservation of health must needs, then, move along these self-same simple lines.

It is ignorance, in most cases, rather than unwillingness that brings upon the race the punishment we call disease.

But how can they be expected to learn who have no teacher?  And how can they teach who are themselves untaught?

It is incumbent upon those who have acquired knowledge to impart life-saving truths, and there is no greater benefactor of his kind than he who reduces life’s problems to their simplest terms.

“He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.”  Such is the dictum of King David, the psalmist, as expressed in the Hebrew Scriptures.

All that man’s intellect can conceive of the Almighty is bounded by its expression in Nature.

It is neither arrogant, nor irreverent, then, to claim with reasonable confidence that the devoted service of long years of close application to research in Nature’s secret dwelling-place may entitle such an one to share the guidance of the Almighty mind and inspire him to share its favours with his fellow man.

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This then, the Author of this brochure, realizing vividly and with sympathy, humanity’s sore need, has been constrained to formulate, for the benefit of those desirous to learn;—­a means of enlightenment suitable and accessible to all.  For although, to quote from Goethe, whose transcendent mind was almost omniscient in all mundane things: