Simple
Parents have a most solemn obligation resting upon them to conform to right habits of eating and drinking. Set before your children simple, wholesome food, avoiding everything of a stimulating nature. The effect which a meat diet has upon nervous children is not to make them sweet tempered and patient, but peevish, irritable, passionate, and impatient of restraint. Virtuous practices are lost, and corruption destroys mind, soul, and body.
Much injury is done to health by the variety of the food which is seen on so many tables. Take the different dishes which are placed on the table at one meal, and put them all together in one vessel. Stir them up together. Does it make the stomach turn to look at it? Leave it for a few hours and it will ferment. Yet thousands compel their stomachs to receive just such a mass as this every day. Half masticated meat, condiments, spices, pies, and sweet puddings are washed down with tea and coffee. The abused stomach is obliged to take them and do the best it can with them.
Is there not sin in placing upon the table such a variety at one meal? Often the desire to return to moral integrity is expressed. But this will never be until we return to simple, healthful foods, until we eat and drink to glorify God, not to gratify our perverted appetites.
Died because of bad cooking; died because of sour bread; died of medication; died of an abused stomach--this might be written over the graves of many. This suicidal process is gradual. Nature bears the abuse as long as possible, but in the end she must succumb. The oil in the lamp of life is mixed with a variety of injurious substances, and the lamp refuses to burn longer. It is extinguished, not because God willed it, but because of the manifest disregard of nature's laws.
What we eat and drink has an important bearing upon our lives and characters.
14MR 299