The age-herald., 1901-12-01
Dyspeptic Christianity.


 Do not mistake narcotic disturbance you that the majority of the dreams are merely the penalty of outraped digestive organs, and you have no right to mistake the nightmare for heavenly revelation. Late suppers are warranty deed for bad dreams. Highly spiced salads at Il o'clock at right. instead of opening the door heavenward, open the door in fernal and diabolical. You outrage nat ural law. and you insult the God who made those laws. It takes from three to five hours to digest food, and you have no right to keep your digestive organs in struggle when the rest of you body is in somnolence. The general rule is eat nothing after o'clock at night, re- tire at 10, sleep on your right side, keep the window open five inches for ventila- tion, and other worlds will not disturb you much. By physical maltreatment you take the ladder that Jacob saw in his dream. and you lower it 10 the neither world. allowing the ascent of the demo. niacal. Dreams are midnight dyspepsia An unregulated desire for something to eat ruined the race in paradise, and an unregulated desire for something to eat keeps 1t ruined. The world during GOOD years has tried in vain to digest that first apple. The world will not be evan. Belized until Vt get rid of a dyspcptic Christianity. Healthy people do not want the cadaverous and sleepy thing that some people call religion. They want religion that lives regularly by day and sleeps soundly by night If through trouble or coming on of old age or exhaustion of Christian service you can not sleep we'll then you may expect frcm God ''sonss in the night" but there are no blessed communications to those who willingly surrender to indigestibles. Napoleon's army at Leipsic Dresden and Borodino came near being destroyed through the disturbed gastric juices of its commander. That is the way you have lost some of your battles.
 Mission of Dreams.
 Another remark I make is that our dreams are apt to be merely the echo of our daytime thoughts. will give you a receipt for pleasant dreams. Fill your days with elevated thought and unselfish action and your dreams will be set to music. If all day you are gouging and grasping and avaricious in your dreams you will see gold that you cannot touch, and bargains in which you were out Shylocked. If during the day you arc irascible and pugnacious and gunpow- dery of disposition, you will at night have battle with enemies in which they will get the best of you. If you are all day long in a hurry, at night you will dream of rail trains that you want to catch while you cannot move one inch toward the depot. If you are always ovef-sus- picious and expectant Of assault. you wili have at night hallucinAtions of assasslns with daggers drawn. No one wonders that Richard IT,, the iniquitious, the night before the battle of Ellsworth Field dreamed that all thorb, whom he had murdered stared at him and that he was torn to pieces by demons from the pit. The scholars dream is a philosophic echo. The poets dream is a rythmic echo. Coleridge composed his "Kubla Khan" asleep in a narcotic dream and, waking up. wrote down 300 lines of 1t. Tartinia, the violin player. composed his most wonderful sonata while asleep in dream so vivid that waking, he easily transferred 1t to paper.
 Waking thoughts have their echo in sleeping thoughts. If man spend his life in trying to make others happy and Is heavenly minded. around his pillow he will see cripples who have got over their crutch. and processions Of celestial im- pefials. and hear the grand march roll down from drums of heaven over jasper parapets. You, are very apt to hear in dreams what you hear when you are wide awake.
 Now. having shown you that having Bible we ought to be>satisfied not getting any further communication from God.