Abundant Living [antikvár]

PREFACE Everyone may and can live abundantly. The business of life is to live and to live well and adequately and abundantly, gut this age knows almost everything about life except how to live it Tt -is not enough to know about life—we must know how to live life, "I have lived through everything except life, said one disillusioned son of this age. We can pick life to pieces and explain its constituent parts and then fail miserably to put it together again in such a way that it becomes a co-ordinated, harmonious whole. We are long on analysis and short on synthesis. The reason is not hard to find. We have dissected life and desiccated it in the process. We have picked the flower of life to pieces, petal by petal, and have lost its beauty in the procedure. We have handed the body over to the doctor, the mind to the psychiatrist, and the soul to the minister, treating these three parts as separate entities. They are not separate. Life is a whole. You cannot affect one part without affecting all three. Doctors vary in their estimate of the percentage of people who pass on mental and spiritual sickness to their bodies. In a group of Johns Hopkins doctors, a psychiatrist said that 40 per cent of the cases that came to their clinic were, mental and spiritual in origin. But the surgeons present insisted that the percentage was probably 60 per cent. A pastor friend of mine, while being examined by a very able doctor, remarked, "Doctor, I wish I had the equipment for dealing with people that come to me as you have for dealing with those who come to you." The doctor replied, "Forty per cent of the people who come to me should not have gone past you." While he put the percentage at 40 per cent, an outstanding neurologist put it at 80 per cent, and another able doctor put it at 85 per cent, with only 15 per cent physical. The American Medical Association officially approves of the statement of Dr. C. Raimer Smith in Hygeia, June, 1931, that the percentage is about 50-50. Here, then, we have estimates varying from 40 per cent to 85 per cent of people who are passing on their mental and spiritual sicknesses to their bodies. But what of those whose mental and spiritual dis- v