[HYGIENE from a Bible standpoint has always been a favorite theme with Mrs. White. Her husband, Elder James White, was also especially interested in the study of Bible hygiene, and took great pleasure in showing the wonderful harmony between true science and the Scriptures. His intimate acquaintance with the views of his wife, and his own experience with disease during several attacks of grave illness, by which he was led to a most careful consideration of the various phases of the health question, qualified him in a peculiar manner to write and speak intelligently upon this subject. The reader will be both interested and instructed by the perusal of the following collation of the more important writings of Elder White on the subject of hygiene from a Bible standpoint.]
The eccentric Lorenzo Dow once truthfully said that prejudice is like a cork in a bottle; it does not let anything out, neither does it let anything into the bottle. So blind prejudice will blockade the mind, and not allow errors to pass out of it, nor the plainest truths to enter in. It is asking too much when we say to men, “Give up your prejudices.” But few could do this, should they try. In fact, they have a right to their prejudices, if held subordinate to reason. Hence we do not ask men to surrender their prejudices; but we do invite Christians, in the name of reason and religion, to so far waive their prejudices as to weigh evidence in the scales of reason and justice.
With a large portion of the people, the Bible is the highest and safest authority in all matters of truth and164duty. Prove to Christian men and women, who fear God and tremble at his word, that existing reformatory movements are in strict harmony with the teachings of the Sacred Scriptures, and they will no longer regard them as unworthy of their notice. But the very general impression that the restrictions of hygienic practice are not sustained by the word of God, has placed many sincere Christians where it is difficult to reach them.
It is a painful fact that vain philosophy, driveling skepticism, and the extremes of some who have been connected with the health reform movement, have done much to prejudice sincere persons against the true philosophy of health. But those who revere God and his holy word can be reached with the plain declarations of Scripture. We hope to make it appear that the Bible does not justify Christians in many of the common and fashionable habits of our time,—habits which sustain a close relation to life and health,—but that it does demand of them changes from these injurious practices. If we succeed in doing this, it will be considered highly proper, by all Bible Christians, that the attention of the Christian public should be called to the subject of Bible Hygiene.
“God is love;” and his revealed will relates to man’s well-being in this life, as well as in that which is to come. Our heavenly Father does not take pleasure in the miseries of this mortal state. He delights in the happiness of obedient intelligences in this world, as well as in the rapturous joys of the redeemed in the world to come. The Bible teaches how to so live in this life as to promote that health and happiness so favorable to the securing of eternal life. True godliness does not blindly overlook and stupidly neglect the laws of our present existence, and try to view (however dimly) the immortal state only. Godliness is profitable unto all things. It gives promise of the life that now is, and also of that which is to come.
The religion of the Bible was not intended simply as a garment to cover moral and physical impurities. It was165designed to convert the entire man, — soul, body, and spirit, — that he might be pure without and within. That bogus piety which would give license to consecrated gluttony, devoted lust, and sanctified filthiness, is simply a burlesque upon the religion of the Bible. “Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean; and I will receive you, and will be a Father unto you, and ye shall be my sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty. Having therefore these promises, dearly beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God.” This is Bible religion. This is true godliness. It proposes to elevate in this life, make fallen beings real men, pure without and within here, and glorified saints in the world to come.
The record of man’s creation, the ample provisions made for his comfort, his glorious surroundings,—all these attest the love of God to created intelligences in this life. “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food.”
Of all the creatures that God made, man was his best work. He was formed in the image of his Creator, and was made lord over the Creator’s works. Physically considered, Adam must have been a noble being. “God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” In its highest sense, this was true of the first man, both intellectually and physically. From Adam to the flood the patriarchs each lived nearly a thousand years. And may we not suppose that the race has fallen off in size and physical strength, in proportion to the average length of life then and now? Noah lived nine hundred and fifty years. For a time he and his sons166must of necessity have eaten flesh as food, and from that point of time the race rapidly declined in length of days. The original curse, with all its accumulated weight of transgression and violation of natural law, has bowed down the race, and caused man to dwindle to his present brief period of existence, marked with disease, decrepitude, and imbecility.
With this view of the subject, we see Adam in Eden, standing in the glory of his manhood, a grand specimen of the perfect work of God. Earth has long since forgotten the grandeur, the beauty, the perfect symmetry, which characterized the first man before there fell upon him the blight of the curse. And there is so close a connection between matter and mind, that when we consider him intellectually, we are carried up in contemplation of what an intellect might have been, unaffected by the extremes incident to the curse and the depraving and depressing influence of continued transgression, until we are well-nigh lost in conjecture. We behold happy Adam, in holy Eden, walking and talking with God, the great originator of thought, and communing face to face with his Son and with the holy angels, the companion of the highest order of intelligences.
Has man been progressing for six thousand years?—Verily, downward, downward! We have only to look back to our parents as they were in the strength of their noon of life, and to our grandparents as their still nobler frames were bowed with the weight of years, to be impressed with the fact that each successive generation suffers under greater physical feebleness than the one before it. This is especially true of American women. It has finally come to this, that by reason of artificial habits and in-door life, and the feebleness thus engendered, not one woman in ten, in our country, is capable of bearing well-developed offspring.
And while we admit that, in the providence of God, the present is an age of discovery and invention,—and many of these things are a necessity to the very existence167of this enfeebled generation,—we cannot but regard the popular idea of the increase of mental strength as at war with sound philosophy and the facts in the case.
“But what will you do with the text,” says some old fogy, who has for a quarter of a century been dreaming of the golden age of mental progression, “that declares that every generation grows weaker and wiser?” We reply that the Sacred Scriptures contain no such text. This saying can be found only among those maxims that are about one half true and the other half false. Facts compel us to admit the weakness of the present generation, and seriously to question its superior wisdom. Those who have listened to the words of the eloquent Wendell Phillips, in his lecture upon the Lost Arts, must have been impressed with the fact that wisdom has not been especially reserved for the present generation.
“A sound mind in a sound body,” is a maxim worthy of a place in the writings of Moses, Solomon, or Paul. Natural and correct habits of life result in health, physical force, mental clearness, and mental strength. Artificial and incorrect habits always tend to physical and mental enfeeblement. We call in question the sanity of those writers who blow hot and cold, in first representing that the bad habits of the present generation are ruinous to body and soul, to physical, mental, and moral strength; and then, by way of change in the exercises, strike up the popular siren song of grand progression!
But we turn from the sad picture of degeneracy to contemplate again the first man. God in love created him to enjoy the delights of taste, and to feast the eye on the beautiful. To this end his senses were perfect. “And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food.” The God of the Bible is the author of all that is really beautiful; and we please him best when we, within proper limits, love that which he has made lovely. The great God has prepared a feast for the sight, as well as for the taste. We should provide for the proper gratification of both.168The thousands who build large pig-pens and extensive hen-parks, and yet grumble over the labor and expense required to produce the sweet adornments of flowers, shrubs, and ornamental trees, are hardly within speaking distance of the Christian’s beautiful heaven. But, thank God, we may not only feast the eye with the beauties of nature, but by returning to more natural habits of eating and drinking, we may educate and restore the appetite so as to enjoy much of the original delights of taste.
Contemplating the good things which God has made for the happiness of men, and the present enjoyment which they may afford a sanctified sight and taste, we look back over six thousand years of transgression of divine and natural law, — during which time the curse has been rending the earth, man has been degenerating, and moral darkness, like the pall of death, has enveloped groaning creation, — and exclaim, What must have been the delights of Eden before sin entered!
FOOD, AIR, AND EXERCISE.
The Bible was given for the well-being of man in this life, as well as a rule by which he may attain to immortal life. And the first grand hygienic rule laid down was that which prescribed man’s diet. God said to Adam, “Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.” To every tree of the garden, excepting one, our first parents were to have free access.
The very general belief that the Bible sustains flesh-eating, swine’s flesh not excepted, makes it difficult to impress the minds of Christian men and women with the importance of adopting the vegetarian diet, until this false notion is removed. We are aware, however, that it is no small task to remove prejudice from minds, especially on subjects in which appetite is concerned.
There are certain facts which have an important bearing upon the subject of flesh as an article of food. These we will briefly notice.
It was not the plan of God in creation that the life of any of his creatures should be taken. Death, in man or beast, wherever it might exist, came in consequence of sin, and this whole mammoth custom of taking the life of God’s creatures to sustain human life, is simply the fruit of transgression. Had our first parents maintained their Eden innocence, had the curse never fallen upon man or beast, the earth would never have been stained with a drop of blood; the almost universal custom of flesh-eating, with its attendant pain and death, would never have been known.
The Creator, in definitely stating what should constitute food for man, did not mention flesh. If he had formed the human teeth to tear the flesh of animals, as some170urge, and designed that we should subsist largely upon animal food, flesh would have been at least mentioned in Adam’s bill of fare. The word meat, as used in the Bible, means simply food, and is so defined by the best authorities. The American Tract Society’s Bible Dictionary says: “Meat, in the English Bible, usually signifies food, and not merely flesh. Gen. 1:29, 30; Matt. 15:37. So in Luke 24:41: ‘Have ye here any meat?’ literally, anything to eat? The meat-offerings of the Jews were made of flour and oil. Leviticus 2.” William Smith, classical examiner of the University of London, in his Dictionary of the Bible, says of the word meat: “It does not appear that the word meat is used in any one instance in the authorized version of either the Old or the New Testament in the sense which it now almost exclusively bears of animal food. The latter is denoted uniformly by flesh.” Animal food, then, did not constitute any part of the bill of fare of the holy pair in Eden. As true as the book of Genesis, that first venerable gentleman, who lived nine hundred and thirty years, without either the dyspepsia or the gout, was a vegetarian.
So far as we can learn from the sacred record, it was not until after the flood, a period of more than sixteen hundred years from the expulsion from Eden, that permission was given man to eat flesh. Its use had then become a matter of necessity. The waters of the flood had been upon the earth more than a year. By this time the patriarch’s stock of provisions must have been very low, and the desolated earth could furnish nothing until it could be produced from the seed preserved in the ark. In this state of things, God said to Noah, “Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.” The very language of this permission conveys the idea that, up to that time, the green herb, or that which grew out of the ground,—vegetables, fruits, and grains,—constituted man’s diet.
And certainly, judging from the sacred record, that171was a time of remarkably good health. From Adam to Noah, a period of more than sixteen hundred years of vegetarian living, no mention is made of the sickness and death of children, of feebleness in youth or middle age, or of fevers, dyspepsia, gout, or consumption. All lived in the full enjoyment of health nearly one thousand years, or until the springs of life, at last grown weary, stood still. Obituary notices of that time do not mention local diseases, which in our day are caused by the breaking down of certain organs of the system while others remain strong. We read of no sufferings long drawn out, no excruciating agonies in death. The record simply gives the measure of each life, and its cessation.
“And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years; and he died.”
“And all the days of Seth were nine hundred and twelve years; and he died.”
“And all the days of Enos were nine hundred and five years; and he died.”
“And all the days of Cainan were nine hundred and ten years; and he died.”
“And all the days of Mahalaleel were eight hundred ninety and five years; and he died.”
“And all the days of Jared were nine hundred sixty and two years; and he died.”
“And all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years; and he died.”
“And all the days of Lamech were seven hundred seventy and seven years; and he died.”
As the second hygienic principle in the ample provision for man’s happy existence, we notice the natural beauties with which the Creator surrounded him. “And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight.” If after the three-fold curse on account of sin—first, that which followed the sin of Adam; second, that which followed the first murder; and, third, the terrible curse of the flood, which left a large portion of the earth’s surface in its present172broken and barren condition—if after six thousand years of the blighting, dwindling, deforming influence of the curse, there remains real beauty in the trees, vines, shrubs, and flowers,—a beauty more exquisite than can be found in the finest works of art,—what must have been the grandeur and glory of the trees and flowers of Paradise, fresh from the hand of the Infinite Artist!
And the Son of God, in addressing the “innumerable multitude,” pointed them to the delicate lily, declaring that “Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” The superiority of the works of nature over those of art, was not a matter of debate with the Son of God. A single lily in his day, from the soil which had long felt the blight and mildew of the curse, possessed more glory than Solomon in all his royal array. If this be true of a single lily of the field four thousand years from the original glory of creation, what must have been the delights of our first parents as they stood in Eden before sin had paralyzed their senses, or the curse had touched a single leaf!
Man’s employment, as seen in the original design, is also worthy of notice. “The Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.” Man was designed for activity in the open light of the sun and the free air of heaven. These conditions were important to the joys of his existence. The subsequent curse upon Adam was not in that he should labor, but that his labors should be attended with difficulties.
The natural habits of the people for the first generations after the fall were evidently conducive to longevity and health. There is no mention of houses until the flood. Before that event, and long after it, many of the people, at least, dwelt in tents. Hiding away from sunlight and pure air, behind closed doors, together with other artificial habits, has well-nigh ruined the race. None but those worthy of death, or the next thing to it—close confinement in prison—should be made to suffer such wretched173treatment. We admire that simple wisdom which said, “Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun.”
Proper exercise in the open air and genial sunshine, ranks among God’s highest and richest blessings to man. It gives form and strength to the physical organism, and, all other habits being equal, is the surest safeguard against disease and premature decay. Being man’s natural condition, it also gives buoyancy and strength to thought, and the mind maintains a healthful balance, free from the extremes resulting from artificial life.
It is true that artificial habits, which are in almost everything wrong, have so far perverted and enfeebled our nature that we are ill-prepared to enter at once upon the natural habits of the worthy patriarchs. We cannot begin where they did. Something may be done, but it is vain to talk of regaining all that has been lost in size, strength, health, and length of days. For this, however, we earnestly plead, that the spirit of reform in habits of life may get hold of the minds of sensible men and women, and that the rapid downward current may be checked.
The tendency to feebleness and premature decay in American women, is too evident to admit of a doubt, and to no one thing is it so clearly traceable as to their habit of staying so closely in-doors. The aboriginal women of our country are as strong as the men. And why? — Simply because their habits are so nearly like those of the men, — spending, as they do, so much of their time in the open air. This is also true, to a large extent, of European women who labor side by side with their husbands in the field.
Every room, and especially every sleeping-room, in the house, should be well-ventilated throughout the year, both by day and by night. The amount of out-door air that should be admitted, must be regulated by its temperature, and by the ability of the inmates to endure. Every man, woman, and child should enjoy as much of God’s good174sunshine as the circumstances will possibly allow. Admit the light and air, friends, into your houses, and let these grand medicines, wisely mixed by our gracious God, make you strong, healthy, and happy.
SWINE’S FLESH.
Among the creatures distinctly pointed out in the Bible as “unclean,” the swine holds a prominent place, yet it has become a common article of food, even in civilized and enlightened nations. We speak particularly of the flesh of this animal because of its nature, and its common and abundant use by many Christians. These people profess to receive the word of God as a rule of faith and practice, and yet that very word says of the swine, “It is unclean unto you. Ye shall not eat of their flesh, nor touch their dead carcass.” If it be said that this prohibition is Jewish, and therefore not binding upon Christians, we reply:—
1. The distinction between the clean beasts and the unclean, recognized at the flood, long before the existence of a Jew, was established upon the nature and habits of the creatures which God had made. This distinction received the sanction of law in the days of Moses; not, however, because God would have an arbitrary rule for the Jews during sixteen centuries, but because the forbidden things were of themselves unclean, and unfit for man to use as food.
2. The nature of the swine is plainly given as the reason why the Hebrews should not eat of it, nor touch its dead carcass. “It is unclean unto you.” With this agree the words of the prophet, which class swine’s flesh with the “broth of abominable things.” If it be said that these words were given through Jewish prejudice, then we reply that it is the great God that speaks. He changes not, and never speaks from prejudice. Hear him:—
“I have spread out my hands all the day unto a rebellious people, which walketh in a way that was not good, after their own thoughts; a people that provoketh me to anger continually to my face; that sacrificeth in gardens,175and burneth incense upon altars of brick; which remain among the graves, and lodge in the monuments; which eat swine’s flesh, and broth of abominable things is in their vessels.”
“For, behold, the Lord will come with fire, and with his chariots like a whirlwind, to render his anger with fury, and his rebuke with flames of fire. For by fire and by his sword will the Lord plead with all flesh; and the slain of the Lord shall be many. They that sanctify themselves, and purify themselves in the gardens, behind one tree in the midst [margin, one after another], eating swine’s flesh, and the abomination, and the mouse, shall be consumed together, saith the Lord.”
The candid reader, after a careful examination of the chapters from which we have quoted, will entertain doubts as to their application to the Jewish age. In fact, it is evident that they apply to the present age, and that the last quotation, with its threatened judgment for sins, such as eating swine’s flesh, applies definitely to the close of the present age.
Dr. Adam Clarke once said that if he were to offer a burnt-offering to the devil, he should choose a pig stuffed with tobacco. At one time, when invited to ask the blessing at the table, he used these words: “Lord, bless this bread, these vegetables and fruit; and if thou canst bless under the gospel what thou didst curse under the law, bless this swine’s flesh.”
God said of the flesh of swine in the days of Moses: “It is unclean unto you.” What change can have taken place to make it clean, and a proper article of food for Christians? Has God changed his mind on the subject? Has man so changed that what was unclean as an article of food for the Hebrews has become clean to Christians? Or, has the change taken place in the animal? Has the change from the Jewish dispensation improved the nature of hogs? And does the freedom of the world-wide proclamation of the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ give liberty to Christians to eat those things which were an abomination if eaten by the Hebrews?176“But did not God make the swine?” We reply that he did, and that he also made dogs, cats, rats, mice, and toads; not, however, for Christians to eat.
“Then for what were the swine made?”
We may not fully understand why God made rats, lizards, and rattlesnakes; but we are very grateful that we are not obliged to eat all the brutes and reptiles which cannot be definitely assigned to other uses.
The influence of swine-eating upon the human system is in some cases terrible almost beyond description. The word scrofula, which represents a disease very prevalent in our day, the almost endless varieties of which may be named legion, comes from the Latin word scrofa, which signifies “a breeding sow,” the mother of abominations. And it may be a question whether the word, or the terrible disease signified by it, would have existed, had man never eaten swine’s flesh.
The very nature and disposition of the swine accords with his gross habits and diseased flesh. We do not say that the moral evil of swine-eating is proportionate to the physical; but we do say that the very close connection between the physical and the mental, between matter and mind, would lead one to conclude that the physical ruin would tend to debase the moral nature.