A Word Wanted | AdventAI

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Feb 26, 1885

A Word Wanted.

HYDROPHOBIA is our word to express an insane horror of fresh water; we ought to have a word to express the much more common horror of fresh air. Oxygen is as essential to good blood as is food; and it is freely given, but we carefully shut it out. There is nothing which God seems more determined to bestow upon his children than a “draft,” and nothing which they seem more determined not to accept. He wraps the world in air, and wonderful are his contrivances for keeping it always in motion; and ingenious are our contrivances for escaping from the breeze which he creates to give his children life. He sends the fresh air in from the ocean; he sweeps it across the plains and the hills; he fills it with freshness from the snow-clad mountains, and the verdure-clad meadows; he bids it find its way to our lungs to take the death out which every moment we exhale, and put new life in, which he means that every moment we should inhale; it comes knocking for admission at every door and window of our houses, and we put up double windows, and weather-strips, and build a roaring fire in an air-tight stove, and set lamp and fire to burning up all the little oxygen we admit, and grumble at our drafty house, if, in spite of all our efforts, some of the life and health gets in through crack and crevice. Men and women who would turn with disgust from dirty water will take into their system dirty air without a thought of repugnance. There is no pool so filthy, with green scum on top and mud beneath, as the atmosphere of every smoking-car, some public halls, many school-houses, and some churches.—Christian Union.