Your character affects your body

Excerpt from Christian Self-Mastery by Basil W. Maturin pp. 175-6

"The deeds that the body does upon earth, the habits it forms, and the life it lives must as surely affect its future as they affect the future of the soul. Character is stamped upon the whole bodily frame; the way a man walks or sits or stands all help to show something of his character. We are told that every thought is registered in the molecular changes that it effects in the brain.

"And certainly the face is the mirror in which the soul is reflected, upon which it stamps with ever-deepening lines its thoughts, its passions, and its ambitions. The difference between the face of a child and the face of a ma is the same as that between a white sheet of paper and one covered in writing, or between a new garment and one that has been long worn.

"It has been said by a well-known and learned psychologist, 'I believe that we are subject to the law of habit in consequence of the fact that we have bodies. The plasticity of the living matter of our nervous system, in short, is the reason why we do a thing with difficulty the first time, but soon do it more and more easily, and finally, with sufficient practice, do it semi-mechanically, or with hardly any consciousness at all. Our nervous systems have grown to the way in which they have been exercised, just as a sheet of paper or a coat once creased or folded tends to fall forever afterward into the same identical folds.' [William James]

"Had we but eyes to see, we might take scalpel and microscope and read in the bodily frame the moral history of the life of the soul that was its tenant. Indeed, many a characterisitc is stamped so clearly that none can fail to see it. Many we fain would hid but cannot; the telltale flesh has, so to speak, materialized the thoughts of the mind, given them form and shape, and revealed them to the world.

"As the body lies still and silent in death, its mystery and its pathos is that it has been the instrument and cooperator, and remains the material record of the soul's life. No thought ever passed through the mind for one brief moment without the body taking its part and writing the record. Was ever history written with such unerring accuracy as is written the history of the soul in the body it inhabits?"