Chicory Everywhere

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

     The chicory roots are what they make a tea from.  The blue flowers show up along the tall stems and a field of chicory in bloom can bee a very lovely landscape.  They like it along the driveway and the road  and in the lawn, but the flowers do not last very long.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  




"WITHOUT God! In the darkness - an orphan, alone! No Father's loving smile; no strong protecting arm; no heart firm and true, in sunshine and in storm! No God! No God! Without that glory-crowning, joyous hour; without the wondrous beaming of that heavenly light; without his blessed benediction; without that peace which passeth understanding; without God! without God!  


In the world - this gay, bright, sunny world! - its hours of blissful joy; its happy days of loveliness; its nights of beauty and calm enjoyment! - the blue skies of prosperity; the glorious scenery of earth - its verdant vales and mountain heights, noble forests, flowing rivers, and mighty seas; - the soft strains of bird music; the sweet incense of flowers; the streamlet's gentle murmur; the rich sunset glow; the glorious gleaming of night's starry coronet; the thousand pleasured joys of happy existence - without one thought heavenward! No grateful tears welling up from the heart's full fountains to him whose hand painted these glory tints - to him who filleth thine ear with sweet music! In the world - this world of beauty - without God! without God!"




   

September 9, 1858 UrSe, ARSH 135

 





 "It has been somewhat generally conjectured that the early generations had some method of computing time very different from ours, and hence that the patriarchs from Adam to Noah, (with one or two exceptions,) did not, according to the literal record, live to the age of between nine hundred and a thousand years, - afterwards gradually tapering down to between one and two hundred years, at the time of the Egyptian vassalage. 1 But it is a strong, if not a conclusive argument in favor of a literal version, that, if the race had not been created with ten times more vital force than it now possesses, its known violations of all the laws of Health and Life would, long ere this, have extinguished it altogether. So rapidly had it run down, that, at the time of David, - about half-way from Adam to the present day, - he spoke of the average human life, as only three-score years and ten. Now, ask the Bills of Mortality, and they will tell you that in Europe and in the United States, it is but thirty years; and in great cities, but twenty years.  

"Awful and unspeakable violations of God's laws have done this dreadful work. It is the violation of the laws of Health and Life, I emphatically repeat, which has cut down the years of man to this contemptible brevity and harrows those years with pain; which surrounds the cradle with diseases that spring, like wolves, upon the infant at his birth, and which, instead of the olden days when no child was dead-born, brings such multitudes into the world, who, though they may not be dead-born as to breathing, are so as to intellect and heart. A joy that had wings and laughter, once inhabited every joint and vital organ of man's frame. Pain has conquered this festive domain, and turns human breath into sighs.  

"No other part of the organic world with which we are acquainted, has suffered this dire change. Under intelligent culture, the vegetable world is constantly outgrowing itself, in size, beauty and richness. All animal natures thrive, strengthen and surpass the progenitors of their stock, when subjected to the law of their being. Man alone, of all the earth, pales and dwarfs and sickens; begets children, the party-colored tissue of whose existence is the woof of one disease woven into the warp of another; transmits insanity and gout and consumption and scrofula; procreates blindness and deaf-muteness and those human fungi, the brainless idiots; spawns polished imbecility through our cities, which they, by their wealth, send to college, to be converted into pillars of Church and State. And why? Solely because man will break Heaven's laws. Because, for the sake of money, or for pride, disease will marry disease, and blood wed kindred blood. Because, when God commanded Adam to work, that is, to take some form of exercise, in the garden, that is, in the open air, men will not exercise, and will live in dwellings which add artificial poisons to natural ones, and then breathe the virulent compound. Popes and hierarchs send to Jordan to obtain 'holy water' for the baptism of their children, that they may give their spirits a figurative cleansing, but will not keep them physically clean with the pure water at their door; and the royal sinner imports a few cubic yards of the 'holy earth' from Jerusalem, in which that body of his may be buried, wherein sin has rioted and wantoned through all his life; - as though the thought the Omniscient could be cajoled into forgetfulness of the difference between 'holy water or 'holy earth,' and the pure in heart, and the obedient in life.  

But, besides defying all the laws of God in regard to pure air, cleanliness, diet, exercise, and the selection of healthful occupations and healthful sites for residences, - besides these sins of omission, how numberless are the sins of commission which we commit, - sins which are expelling all manly power and womanly endurance from the race. To say nothing of the stimulants taken in our common morning and evening beverages, (which are no more necessary or useful to enable healthy men or women to perform their labor than a morning dram is for the lark or the eagle, for the buffalo or the leviathan,) - to say nothing of these, the people of this nation annually madden their brains with two hundred millions of gallons of intoxicating liquors; and not only stupefy and defile themselves, but transmit irritable nerves and contaminated blood to their children by the consumption of more than thirty million dollars' worth of tobacco. Of this immense sum, squandered for this foul and abominable weed, it is estimated by Dr. Cole, - an able writer on Physiology, - that the members of the Church of Jesus Christ take five million dollars' worth of their share. It is an indisputable fact that, taking the whole United States together, much more money is expended for the single article of cigars than for all the Common Schools in the Union. Cigars against schools; cigars against the great cause of Popular Education; and Appetite triumphs over Intellect and Morals! And where these natural poisons of alcohol and tobacco are used most freely, the Church and the School-house are seen most rarely. I say nothing of opium and other narcotics. And, after quenching still more the expiring embers of vitality that yet glimmer in the race, and corrupting its corruption to a more malignant type, we call ourselves civilized and, - may Heaven pardon the audacity, - Christian. Are those the practices of civilization which honeycomb the bones and leave the muscles sodden, while they irritate the nerves and evaporate electricity from the brain? Is that Christianity which obeys the ceremonial law rather than the eternal; which asks the blessing of Heaven upon its food, and then gorges itself like a wolf; which offers the morning prayer, but all the day long passes unheeding by the hungry, the naked, the sick and by the prisoner's door. The time will come when men will speak of Christian and un-Christian health, as they do now of Christian and un-Christian character.  

"For all these ancestral sins, posterity suffers through all its organism, and in every endowment. We suffer for the offences of our progenitors; our descendants will suffer for ours. The self-justifying ancestor may asseverate that his surfeits of viands and wines and his indulgence in narcotics do him no harm, but, three generations afterwards, delirium and gout will shriek out their denial in his great-grand-children. 

"Now let the man who would fear God, and work righteousness, survey this subject in its comprehensiveness and its solemnity." 


 1865 JW, HHTL 371