Cleanliness | AdventAI

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jun 27, 1865

Cleanliness.

Few persons seem to have a proper idea of the full import of this term. Being next to godliness, the term, cleanliness, implies perfect purity in all our mental and organic relations. Many persons who are exceedingly nice and fastidiously neat in their attentions to the external skin, and in matters of apparel, bedding, rooms, furniture, etc., are notwithstanding, extremely heedless in regard to internal conditions and external surroundings. They will continually take into their stomachs and lungs such aliments and miasms as poison the blood and befoul the secretions; while they will permit the elements of contagion to accumulate to any extent in their cellars, yards, cesspools and out-buildings. I have known half a dozen members of a family to be prostrated with typhus fever, the chief cause being stagnant water and rotting vegetables in the cellar. Offal and garbage—dead and decomposing vegetable and animal matters of all kinds—in or around any dwelling, are a prolific source of disease. The hog-pen of many of our farmers causes more strange, putrid, and even fatal diseases than most persons suspect. I can hardly conceive of a fouler concentration of malignant and pestilent miasms than those which always emanate from a den of swine while undergoing the process of fattening. If folks will persist in keeping piggeries, they should be located so far from the dwelling-house that the abominable stench thereof will not be offensive to noses polite.