In these two ways more than in all others do we wreck this third man, the body, for we are what we eat, daily, weekly, yearly, and we cannot get away from this fact; also we ruin the body almost as surely and often more quickly by the usual sexual excesses, depraving one of the most beautiful of all our endowments by indiscriminate excesses.

Venereal disease is not the greatest danger, though it carries its punishments closely following on the indiscretion, but not always.

The greatest danger is in the physical deterioration that is the direct result of a too free indulgence in the sex life.

Psychiatrists, who deal with mental states wholly, and who so frequently appear in mental cases in the courts of law, tell us that by far the greater number of insane are so because of an aberrant sex function, uncontrolled desire, depletion of the nerve structure and function by overindulgence in sex relations or masturbation, and no doubt they are correct in this.

It is complete misunderstanding of the sex relation and its object that is the nearly universal cause of marital disharmony. This is admittedly true.

This third man is equipped with a wonderful set of glands so interrelated that the loss of any one of these will wreck the function of the entire chain, throwing them into imbalance and disharmony, and among these the sex glands are perhaps preeminent.

All these so-called ductless glands, or endocrines, secrete agents called hormones, catalysts, stimulators of function, and it requires all of them to keep the machinery going smoothly at all times.

The sex glands of the human secrete not only the ova or sperm cells to promote reproduction of species, but also hormones to enter into this chain of zymotic action to keep every function of life moving at its best rate.

This is their greatest function, that of reproduction being rather incidental to this.

When these glands of reproduction are lost the vital hormone chain is broken, and never again will the man or woman be the same, physically or mentally, for no more will the hormones produced by these circulate in the system to perform their work of stimulation of function.

Watch the rapid aging of the unfortunate victim of the surgical removal of the ovaries, and realize why this is so.

Once this removal was considered quite the thing, but even the more ambitious surgeons are growing more conservative on this subject of wholesale removal of these really vital glands.

We cannot break Nature's chain of protection with impunity, and let us hope that the respect of the surgeon for these little organs will continue to develop till their removal will be but a dernier ressort in the near future.

Now let us not lose sight of the fact that we have the control of this whole triune man under our wills by compelling, as we are able to do, a clean body.

The body, the third man, is completely under our own voluntary control, and, also, keeping in mind the law that action and reaction are always equal, we have already outlined the means by which the entire man can be kept normal.

Remembering what was said in fourth and fifth chapters on what is disease and how it originates, you will see that in order to keep this third man straight you will have to watch carefully what goes into him at all times.

When the Lord turned Adam and Eve loose in the Garden of Eden, food was of importance, and He commanded them to be fruitful and replenish the earth, that is, use the sex function for the further promotion of the wonderful species that was at last completed.

He further advised them that they should eat of every herb that is upon the face of the whole earth, and of every herb bearing seed (vegetables, greens, grains), and of the fruit of every tree, in which there is the seed of a tree bearing fruit, which needs no explanation or qualification. These were complete and specific directions for feeding.

No mention was made of fire in the preparation of these things for food, for man was then a full grown man, able to live on Nature's offerings just as she presented these.

No mention was made of flesh of animal or fish, nor was the intention implied that these were ever to be used.

Compare these simple directions with the modern menu of the average American family today or with the average hotel menu, and see if there are not grounds for suspicion that the so evident changes in custom in the matter of eating may be made to account for man's decline almost from that time.

Not till the flood have we any record of the use of fire in the preparation of food, or of the use of flesh as a part of the diet of man.

The average of the first ten recorded generations, (omitting only Enoch, who was translated at a tender age) was nine hundred and ten years.

After the great flood the use of flesh appears, also the use of fire in the preparation of food, and when Moses wrote his famous directions for Israel he noted that a man should live to one hundred and twenty years.

Later David, the sweet singer of Israel, reduced this period of average life to seventy years, or if strong, then eighty years, and today we are satisfied with an average age of fifty-three, and are inclined to brag about it.

Is it possible that we have degenerated because we have departed from the original directions for diet?

Surely this third man is but a poor example of what a man should be in either health or achievement, yet we are too easily satisfied because our standards are too low.

If the young man who is struggling with his desires were to go at once to a raw diet of strictly natural foods in their natural state, everything that grows out of the ground in edible form, he would be surprised that before long there would not be the continual struggle, a thing he can easily prove to himself.

If he is impatient and wishes to reduce himself quickly to internal cleanliness, let him fast for thirty or forty days, even as Jesus did in his preparation for his great ministry, or as was so common a mode of preparation in the times of Jesus.

These are the means of purification of this very bothersome third man that lead straight to results, and are not so hard to follow as would seem on the surface to be the case, for this is only in the seeming, and because we are looking at the subject from our present standpoint of conventional habit.

More of this later under "Vital and Dead Foods."