The Importance of Upholding Health Principles by Daisy Ingle

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Apr 9, 1908

The Importance of Upholding Health Principles

By Daisy Ingle

THE young people of the St. Helena Sanitarium training-school are known as Seventh-day Adventist medical missionary nurses. As such they are to go out into the world, bearing the advent message. The light of this message is to go to all lands, and penetrate even the darkest parts of the earth. We each have a part assigned us in this work. It can never be done by committees on plans and resolutions. It means personal consecration, personal sacrifice, personal work. It means a mighty faith in this message as the truth which the world must have.

As a company of workers on the “hillside” we may not feel that the world is watching to see if we live up to the principles which we advocate. But when we go out among the people, our example will count for or against their souls’ salvation. The world is watching, ready to criticize with keenness and severity every one who acts a part in connection with God’s work. Impressions favorable or unfavorable to Bible religion, are constantly made on the minds of all with whom we come in contact.

The world watches to see what fruit is borne by professed Christians. It has a right to look for self-sacrifice from those who claim to believe advanced truth. As young people we ought to be earnest, consecrated Christians, living up to the light God has given us. We can not expect to be an aid in helping to proclaim the advent message, if by our own lives we do not live out its principles.

The Lord has given us a message in regard to health reform. We have grown up with this message as part of our education. The principles taught have become common to us, and we are largely indifferent to them. Can God be pleased when health reform workers by their practise teach principles that are entirely opposed to their profession? Guilt rests upon us who have had so much light upon health reform, because we have not appreciated or improved the light. The greatest objection to health reform is that those who advocate it do not live it out. We become stumbling-blocks to many who are earnest in their desires to know what is right. Our words, our actions, and our dress are daily, living preachers, gathering with Christ or scattering abroad.

As we enter the homes of the sick and the dying, they will look to us for help, and many times where our words would fall on prejudiced ears, our lives might forcibly send home the message we are so anxious to convey.

All who are truly engaged in the work of the Lord for these last days will have a decided message to bear. The world needs to see in Christians an evidence

of the power of Christianity. We are to be living teachers of the gospel. The same interest and tenderness that Christ manifested toward us we are to manifest toward others. We are to work with patience, with interest, with determination, believing that Jesus can do much through human ability consecrated to his service. The men and women who are most successful in winning souls for Christ are those who in humility open the Scriptures in households, and who talk familiarly with the members of the families, not about things of little importance, but of the great themes of redemption.

We must know the great truths of our day, and knowing them, we must live them out, and not rest until those with whom we come in daily contact have also heard and believed. We are not here simply to learn a trade, or to become professional men and women. We are learning how to carry the message of a soon-coming Saviour. The great possibility of this work is nothing less than the consummation of the hope of every true advent believer—the ushering in of that glad day when “the righteous shall inherit the land, and dwell therein forever,” where the inhabitant shall not say, “I am sick,” and “the voice of weeping shall no more be heard.”

DAISY INGLE.