Ventilation: Why Pure Air Matters and How to Get It
We must breathe or die. Bad air is poison, and breathing it is dying by degrees. From this come weakness, illness, death. Many a dull sermon, stupid prayer, and dead meeting, might be enlivened and improved by a little pure air. It is not hot air that does the mischief—we can bear almost any amount of heat; it is impure air—depressing, suffocating, deadly. God has poured out the air forty miles deep all around the globe, and it is a shame if we cannot get enough to breathe to keep us alive and well. “But how shall we get the air? If we open the doors and windows, some who sit in the currents of air will take cold and be sick; our house has no ventilators, and we cannot please everybody if we try; what shall we do?” Do this: Prepare a piece of wood three inches wide, and exactly as long as the breadth of the window, and beveled on the top and bottom just like the bottom of the window-sash. Let the sash be now raised, the slip of wood placed on the sill, and the sash drawn closely down upon it. If the slip has been well fitted, there will be no draft in consequence of the displacement of the sash at its lower part; but the top of the lower sash will overlap the bottom of the upper one, and between the two bars perpendicular currents of air, not felt as draft, will enter and leave the room. This will give moderate, but constant, ventilation; and if houses of worship were also thoroughly aired between meetings, the healthfulness and comfort of many places would be greatly increased. If, in addition to this, persons will dress easily and healthfully, making all the clothing at the waist fully nine-tenths as large as it is under the arms, so that they can inflate their lungs naturally, we shall have very few meetings disturbed or broken up by some one fainting away in a crowded house on Sunday evenings, and requiring to be carried out and to have their garments loosened, that they may draw a long breath, and so recover their senses. God breathed into man's nostrils the breath of life. Let him take heed how he abuses the precious gift; and let him see to it that what he breathes is still the breath of life, and not the breath of poison, disease, and death.