Is it not blasphemous to assume that God would blame us and withhold his aid because we dared to use the faculties, capacities, and powers with which he has endowed us?  You say, “Nobody is foolish enough to claim such things.”  But this is the teaching of a powerful healing-cult.  Its members are forbidden, on penalty of expulsion, to use in the treatment of human ailments the most innocent natural remedies.  The giving of an enema, or the common-sense regulation of diet are regarded as sufficient to nullify the power of their metaphysical formulas and to prevent the working of Nature’s healing forces.

One of our patients who had been under such treatment until she was in a dying condition, told us afterwards that her bowels often did not move for a week, and that, when she complained to her “healer” about this condition and asked permission to take an enema, he answered her:  “Pay no attention.  The Lord is taking care of that in some other way.”

The man who said this had been a prominent allopathic physician before he turned “healer.”  He, too, like so many others ignorant of Nature’s simple laws, had swung from one extreme to the other, from allopathic overdoing to metaphysical underdoing.  In this instance, the Lord “took care” of the patient’s bowels until she was taken down with a severe attack of appendicitis and peritonitis.

Amidst all the extremes, Nature Cure points the common-sense middle way.  Basing its teachings and its practices on a clear understanding of the laws of health, disease, and cure, it refrains from suppressing acute diseases with poisonous drugs or the knife, realizing that they are in reality Nature’s cleansing and healing efforts.  Neither does it sit idly by and expect the Lord, or metaphysical formulas, or the medicine bottle and the knife, to do our work and to make good for our violations of Nature’s laws.

Understanding the Law, Nature Cure believes in cooperating with the law; in giving the Lord a helping hand.  It teaches that “God helps him who helps himself,” that He will not become angry and refuse His help if His children use rightly the reason, the willpower, and the self-control with which he has endowed them, so that they may achieve their own salvation.

Nature Cure from beginning to end is one grand, true prayer.  It teaches The Law on all planes of being, the physical, the mental, the moral, and the spiritual; and it insists that the only way to attain perfect health of body, mind, and soul is to comply with the law to the best of our ability.  When we do that, we place ourselves in allgnment with the constructive principle in Nature, and in exact proportion to our intelligent and voluntary co-operation with the laws of our being, all good things will come to us.

Therefore we pray:  “Father, give me of Thy strength that I may live in harmony with Thy law, for thus only will all good come to me.”

Chapter XL