Your daughter’s health would have been better had she been educated to physical labor. Her muscles and nerves are weak, lax, and feeble. How can they be otherwise when they have so little use? This child has but little power of endurance. A small amount of physical exercise wearies her and endangers health. There is not elasticity in muscles and nerves. Her physical powers have so long lain dormant that her life is nearly useless. Mistaken mother! know you not that in giving your daughter so many privileges of learning the sciences, and not educating her to usefulness and household labor, you do her a great injury? This exercise would have hardened, or confirmed, her constitution and improved her health. Instead of this tenderness proving a blessing, it will prove a terrible curse. Had the family burdens been shared with the daughter, the mother would not have overdone, and might have saved herself much suffering and benefited the daughter all the time. She should not now commence to labor all at once and bear the burdens which one at her age could bear, but she can educate herself to perform physical labor to a much greater extent than she has ever done in her life. (1T 700.1) MC VC

Sister C has a diseased imagination. She has secluded herself from the air until she cannot endure it without inconvenience. The heat of her room is very injurious to health. Her circulation is depressed. She has lived in the hot air so much that she cannot endure the exposure of a ride out of doors without realizing a change. Her poor health is owing somewhat to the exclusion of air, and she has become so tender that she cannot have air without making her sick. If she continues to indulge this diseased imagination, she will be able to bear scarcely a breath of air. She ought to have the windows lowered in her room all through the day, that there may be a circulation of air. God is not pleased with her for thus murdering herself. It is unnecessary. She has become thus sensitive through indulging a diseased mind. Air she needs, air she must have. She is destroying not only her own vitality, but that of her husband and daughter, and of all who visit her. The air in her room is decidedly impure and dead; none can have health who accustom themselves to such an atmosphere. She has petted herself in this matter until she cannot visit the houses of her brethren without taking cold. For her own sake and for the sake of those around her, she must change this; she should accustom herself to the air, increasing it a little every day, until she can breathe the pure, vitalizing air without injury. The surface of the skin is nearly dead, because it has no air to breathe. Its million little mouths are closed, because they are clogged by the impurities of the system, and for want of air. It would be presumption to let in a free draft of air at once from out of doors, all through the day. Let it in by degrees; change gradually. In a week she can have the windows down two or three inches day and night. (1T 700.2) MC VC

Lungs and liver are diseased because she deprives herself of vital air. Air is the free blessing of heaven, calculated to electrify the whole system. Without it the system will be filled with disease and become dormant, languid, feeble. Yet you have all been for years living with a very limited amount of air. In thus doing, your wife drags others into the same poisonous atmosphere with herself. None of you can possess clear, unclouded brains while breathing a poisonous atmosphere. Sister C dreads to stir out to go anywhere because she must feel the change in the atmosphere and take cold. She can yet be brought into a much better condition of health if she rightly treats herself. Twice a week she should take a general bath, as cool as will be agreeable, a little cooler every time, until the skin is toned up. (1T 701.1) MC VC

She need not linger along as she does, always sick, if you will all as a family heed the instructions given of the Lord. “He that will love life, and see good days, let him refrain his tongue from evil, and his lips that they speak no guile: let him eschew evil, and do good; let him seek peace, and ensue it. For the eyes of the Lord are over the righteous, and His ears are open unto their prayers: but the face of the Lord is against them that do evil.” 1 Peter 3:10-12. A contented mind, a cheerful spirit, is health to the body and strength to the soul. Nothing is so fruitful a cause of disease as depression, gloominess, and sadness. Mental depression is terrible. You all suffer from it. The daughter is fretful, partaking of the spirit of the father; and then the heated, oppressed atmosphere, deprived of vitality, benumbs the sensitive brain. The lungs contract, the liver is inactive. (1T 702.1) MC VC

Air, air, the precious boon of heaven which all may have, will bless you with its invigorating influence if you will not refuse it entrance. Welcome it, cultivate a love for it, and it will prove a precious soother of the nerves. Air must be in constant circulation to be kept pure. The influence of pure, fresh air is to cause the blood to circulate healthfully through the system. It refreshes the body and tends to render it strong and healthy, while at the same time its influence is decidedly felt upon the mind, imparting a degree of composure and serenity. It excites the appetite, and renders the digestion of food more perfect, and induces sound and sweet sleep. (1T 702.2) 1 I MC VC

The effects produced by living in close, ill-ventilated rooms are these: The system becomes weak and unhealthy, the circulation is depressed, the blood moves sluggishly through the system because it is not purified and vitalized by the pure, invigorating air of heaven. The mind becomes depressed and gloomy, while the whole system is enervated; and fevers and other acute diseases are liable to be generated. Your careful exclusion of external air and fear of free ventilation leave you to breathe the corrupt, unwholesome air which is exhaled from the lungs of those staying in these rooms, and which is poisonous, unfit for the support of life. The body becomes relaxed, the skin becomes sallow, digestion is retarded, and the system is peculiarly sensitive to the influence of cold. A slight exposure produces serious diseases. Great care should be exercised not to sit in a draft or in a cold room when weary, or when in a perspiration. You should so accustom yourself to the air that you will not be under the necessity of having the mercury higher than sixty-five degrees. (1T 702.3) MC VC

You can be a happy family if you will do what God has given you to do and has enjoined upon you as a duty. But the Lord will not do for you that which He has left for you to do. Brother C deserves pity. He has so long felt unhappy that life has become a burden to him. It need not be thus. His imagination is diseased, and he has so long kept his eyes on the dark picture that if he meets with adversity or disappointment, he imagines that everything is going to ruin, that he will come to want, that everything is against him, that he has the hardest time of anyone; and thus his life is made wretched. The more he thinks thus, the more miserable he makes his life and the lives of all around him. He has no reason to feel as he does; it is all the work of Satan. He must not suffer the enemy thus to control his mind. He should turn away from the dark and gloomy picture to that of the loving Saviour, the glory of heaven, and the rich inheritance prepared for all who are humble and obedient, and who possess grateful hearts and abiding faith in the promises of God. This will cost him an effort, a struggle; but it must be done. Your present happiness and your future, eternal happiness depend upon your fixing your mind upon cheerful things, looking away from the dark picture, which is imaginary, to the benefits which God has strewn in your pathway, and beyond these, to the unseen and eternal. (1T 703.1) MC VC