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- p. 279 - Appendix The account given in Chapter X of the part alleged to be played by prayer in relation to my own health would be incomplete if something were not said about the various influences now operating in our sort of society, against both the acquisition of health and its retention if and when secured.         In the first place, there are in our civilization so many occupations and forms of leisure which are incompatible with a sound way of life, and in our own and our contemporaries' blood so many seeds of morbidity and even lethal disease, which no amount of prudent living or scientific knowledge can save us from, that even with the utmost help from the life forces, few of us can hope to be wholly free from disabilities of some kind.         Secondly, despite all our knowledge and mastery of Nature, the forms our civilization has assumed now forces so many poisons upon us, and the conditions making these poisons necessary receive such massive support from the mute and completely unwitting acceptance of them by the ignorant multitude, that the vastness of the external national reforms which would be needed to remove them, make the modern man's prayers for health, however perfectly performed, incapable of wholly protecting him.         The poisons I refer to are first and foremost those present in our water supply. Owing to the universal pollution of our rivers with sewage and the contaminated wastes from factories, dye-works, etc., piped water now provided by the various borough councils even in rural districts, throughout England and Wales, has to be heavily disinfected before being conveyed to consumers. This means that, in order to destroy the noxious micro-organisms introduced by sewage pollution, it has to be chlorinated and, what is more, subsequently treated with sulphate of ammonia to correct the taste imparted by the chlorination.         Thus, with every drink, whether of water, tea, coffee, cocoa, or home-made lemonade, taken by the people of England and Wales, a modicum of chlorine and sulphate of ammonia is also imbibed; and although the individual doses of these two - p. 280 - chemicals in each drink may to all intent and purposes be "harmless" — which means merely that they are not immediately lethal — it could hardly be contended, even by the most ardent advocate of modern progress, that their cumulative effect can be wholly innocuous.         After moving into Ipswich in 1959, I know how much I regretted the deliciously pure drinking water I used to obtain from my private well in the garden of my house at Rishangles, where I lived for eighteen years; for I often found the tea or coffee brewed with the Ipswich town tap-water taste of the doubtless necessary chlorination. Nor do I think that it was only my imagination which, from the moment of taking up my abode in Ipswich, led me to feel much less alert and less happy physically than I had been in my old rural residence; and this despite the fact that Ipswich stands relatively high among modern English towns for the quality of its water.         One can only assume that the feeling of malaise, by becoming habitual in the average town man and woman, ceases to be noticed, and that this may explain why there is so little public complaint about the appalling water supply English people now have to put up with. It is true that occasionally protests are heard. There was one such in Norwich in 1953, when the townspeople complained about the disagreeable taste imparted to their water by "high chlorination", and the City Council were forced for the second time to attend to the matter (Diss Express, 4.9.53). But, surprising as it may seem, such complaints are rare; for when I left London in 1939, partly on account of the intolerable state of the water there, I knew of singularly few people who seemed to be even aware that there was anything amiss with it.         Now, to suppose that the daily ingestion of two poisons, in doses however small, can be quite harmless, is to my mind fantastic; and when, added to it, the modern inhabitant of a country like England has also to consume his daily portion of flour "improvers", anti-staling agents, artificial colourings, preservatives and any number of other toxic substances, either applied to foodstuffs or absorbed by them during their growth; when moreover in his streets and wafted into his open windows he gets air heavily charged with the exhaust fumes of endless chains of cars, it seems like deliberate fooling to convene bodies of experts to discover whether smoking bears any relation to the staggering increase of lung cancer in recent years. - p. 281 -         In any case, these are all conditions inimical to health and general well-being, from which no appeal to the life forces, as we understand them, through prayer, can possibly protect one; and although the individual human being who today tries to observe the sane rules of a wholesome regimen, and adopt practices consistent with a hygienic way of life, may be spared many of the ills which befall his less prudent and less knowledgeable fellows, he cannot hope wholly to escape the penalties which must be incurred by anyone who has to live in any area, urban or rural, of a modern civilized country. Even in the sphere of sex his way of life is often faulty.         This may be a sad reflection on our twentieth century of progress and enlightenment; but it is only the truth, and as the truth, had to be set against what I claim in Chapter X supra.

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