ABSTRACT

Judaism refuses to regard the body as vile, and its well-being as unimportant. Health-culture, then, far from being trivial or optional, is a positive obligation. “There is no riches,” says Ben Sira, “better than health.” Even the physical life is worth living, and we hold it in trust for noble uses. All the familiar acts, therefore, that tend to preserve the physical life are to be performed reverently and in the name of God, under a solemn sense of obligation to Him. Self-mortification, practised for ends far higher than itself, is a virtue ; practised for its own sake, it is a vice. The man who chastens his body for his soul’s sake has his motive to plead for him. But the sensualist has no such justification. Temperance, in the widest meaning of the word—this is the part of virtue, even as it is the part of wisdom. It is the first condition of self-preservation.