THE VALUE OF SUNLIGHT

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · May 27, 1880

THE VALUE OF SUNLIGHT.

WHETHER your home be large or small, give it light. There is no house so likely to be unhealthy as a dark and gloomy house. In a dark and gloomy house, you can never see the dirt that pollutes it. Dirt accumulates on dirt, and the mind soon learns to apologize for this condition because gloom conceals it. Flowers will not healthily bloom in a dark house; and flowers are, as a rule, good indices. We put the flowers in our windows that they may see the light. Are not our children worth many flowers? They are the choicest of flowers. Then, again, light is necessary in order that the animal spirits may be kept refreshed and invigorated. No one is truly happy who, in waking hours, is in a gloomy house or room. The gloom of the prison has ever been considered as a part of the punishment of the prison. It is so. The mind is saddened in a home that is not flushed with light, and when the mind is saddened the whole physical powers soon suffer; the heart beats languidly, the blood flows slowly, the breathing is imperfect, and the oxidation of the blood is reduced, and the conditions are laid for the development of many wearisome and unnecessary constitutional failures and sufferings.

Once again, light, sunlight I mean, is of itself useful to health in a direct manner. Sunlight favors nutrition; sunlight favors nervous function; sunlight sustains, chemically or physically, the healthy state of the blood. Children and other persons living in darkened places become blanched or pale; they have none of the ruddy, healthy bloom of those who live in light. Lately, by an architectural perversity which is simply astounding, it has become a fashion to build houses like those which were built for our ancestors about two centuries ago, and which are called Queen Anne houses or mansions. Small windows, small panes, overhanging window-brows, sharp, long roofs enclosing attics with small windows—these are the residences to which I refer—dull, red, dark, and gloomy. I am told that their excellence lies in their artistic beauty, to which many advantages that we sanitarian artists wish for must necessarily be sacrificed. I would be the last to oppose either the cultivation of art in design or of art in application, and I do not for one moment believe that such opposition is necessary. But these beetle-browed mansions are not so beautiful as health, and never can be. I am bound to protest against them on many sanitary grounds, and on none so much as on their interference with the work of the sun. They produce shade, and those who live in them live in shadow.—Good Words.