American Woman's Home by Catharine Esther Beecher;Harriet Beecher Stowe
page 49 of 529 (09%)
page 49 of 529 (09%)
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vegetables require is furnished by animals; and all goes on, day and
night, without care or thought of man. The human race in its infancy was placed in a mild and genial clime, where each separate family dwelt in tents, and breathed, both day and night, the pure air of heaven. And when they became scattered abroad to colder climes, the open fire-place secured a full supply of pure air. But civilization has increased economies and conveniences far ahead of the knowledge needed by the common people for their healthful use. Tight sleeping-rooms, and close, air-tight stoves, are now starving and poisoning more than one half of this nation. It seems impossible to make people know their danger. And the remedy for this is the light of knowledge and intelligence which it is woman's special mission to bestow, as she controls and regulates the ministries of a home. The poisoning process is thus exhibited in Mrs. Stowe's "House and Home Papers," and can not be recalled too often: "No other gift of God, so precious, so inspiring, is treated with such utter irreverence and contempt in the calculations of us mortals as this same air of heaven. A sermon on oxygen, if we had a preacher who understood the subject, might do more to repress sin than the most orthodox discourse to show when and how and why sin came. A minister gets up in a crowded lecture-room, where the mephitic air almost makes the candles burn blue, and bewails the deadness of the church--the church the while, drugged by the poisoned air, growing sleepier and sleepier, though they feel dreadfully wicked for being so. "Little Jim, who, fresh from his afternoon's ramble in the fields, last evening said his prayers dutifully, and lay down to sleep in a |
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