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The Ministry of Health and Healing
greater importance than the development of character. Parents and
children are robbed of that which is best and sweetest and truest in
life. For fashion’s sake they are cheated out of a preparation for the
life to come.
It was the adversary of all good who instigated the invention
of the everchanging fashions. He desires nothing so much as to
bring grief and dishonor to God by making human beings miserable
and ruining them. One of the means by which he most effectively
accomplishes this is through the devices of fashion that weaken the
body, enfeeble the mind, and belittle the soul.
Many women are subject to serious maladies, and their sufferings
are greatly increased by their manner of dress. Instead of preserving
their health for the trying emergencies that are sure to come, too
often by their wrong habits they sacrifice not only health but life,
and leave to their children a legacy of woe in poor health, perverted
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habits, and false ideas of life.
Any style of dress that cramps the lungs, making correct breath-
ing difficult, should be avoided. It is essential to health that the chest
have room to expand to its fullest extent in order that the lungs may
be enabled to take full inspiration. When the lungs are restricted,
the amount of oxygen received into them is lessened, and the waste,
poisonous matter that should be thrown off through the lungs is
retained.
Dress for Health and Beauty
One of the chief elements in physical beauty is symmetry, the
harmonious proportion of parts. And the correct model for physical
development is to be found not in the figures displayed by French
designers but in the human form as developed according to the laws
of God in nature. God is the author of all beauty, and only as we
conform to His ideal shall we approach the standard of true beauty.
Another evil that custom fosters is the unequal distribution of
the clothing, so that while some parts of the body have more than
is required, others are insufficiently clad. The feet and limbs, being
remote from the vital organs, should be especially guarded from
cold by abundant clothing. It is impossible to have health when the
extremities are habitually cold, for if there is too little blood in them