The Necessity of Pure Air.
Many are invalids for want of pure air. They stay in closed houses, sleep in unventilated bedrooms, breathe over and over again the same air, which becomes at each breathing more heavily charged with carbonic acid gas and the poisonous effluvia thrown off from living bodies, and then wonder that they are ill. People more frequently “take cold” in an unventilated house than they do out of doors. Here is an item of interest in support of that statement: A correspondent to that valuable paper, the Sunday School Times, asks the editor if Jesus and His disciples “slept in the open air with none of a sleeper’s usual conveniences, and if this was, and is, common in Palestine.” To this the editor, Mr. Lyman Trumbull, replies: “Of course, apostles, like shepherds, and like Jacob (Gen. 28:11) and many others in his day, and before and since, in Palestine, slept on the ground in the open air. It is often so in other lands than Palestine. During our Civil War, soldiers from the North and from the South often slept in the open air, without any tent or other covering above them. The writer has thus slept on the ground without any covering, even in a snowstorm or in a cold rain. Indeed, on his first visit home after months of such experience, he slept one night in a house for the first time in months. The result was he actually took cold, as a new experience. Comforts and luxuries have their dangers, as well as do privations.” Do not be afraid of pure air. It is one of God’s greatest common blessings.