[Sidenote:  How does He carry out His laws?]

[Sidenote:  How does He teach His laws?]

I will tell you what was the cause of this hospital pyaemia being in that large private house.  It was that the sewer air from an ill-placed sink was carefully conducted into all the rooms by sedulously opening all the doors, and closing all the passage windows.  It was that the slops were emptied into the foot pans!—­it was that the utensils were never properly rinsed;—­it was that the chamber crockery was rinsed with dirty water;—­it was that the beds were never properly shaken, aired, picked to pieces, or changed.  It was that the carpets and curtains were always musty;—­it was that the furniture was always dusty;—­it was that the papered walls were saturated with dirt;—­it was that the floors were never cleaned;—­it was that the uninhabited rooms were never sunned, or cleaned, or aired;—­it was that the cupboards were always reservoirs of foul air;—­it was that the windows were always tight shut up at night;—­ it was that no window was ever systematically opened even in the day, or that the right window was not opened.  A person gasping for air might open a window for himself.  But the servants were not taught to open the windows, to shut the doors; or they opened the windows upon a dank well between high walls, not upon the airier court; or they opened the room doors into the unaired halls and passages, by way of airing the rooms.  Now all this is not fancy, but fact.  In that handsome house I have known in one summer three cases of hospital pyaemia, one of phlebitis, two of consumptive cough; all the immediate products of foul air.  When, in temperate climates, a house is more unhealthy in summer than in winter, it is a certain sign of something wrong.  Yet nobody learns the lesson.  Yes, God always justifies His ways.  He is teaching while you are not learning.  This poor body loses his finger, that one loses his life.  And all from the most easily preventible causes.[3]

[Sidenote:  Physical degeneration in families.  Its causes.]

The houses of the grandmothers and great grandmothers of this generation, at least the country houses, with front door and back door always standing open, winter and summer, and a thorough draught always blowing through—­with all the scrubbing, and cleaning, and polishing, and scouring which used to go on, the grandmothers, and still more the great grandmothers, always out of doors and never with a bonnet on except to go to church, these things entirely account for the fact so often seen of a great grandmother, who was a tower of physical vigour descending into a grandmother perhaps a little less vigorous but still sound as a bell and healthy to the core, into a mother languid and confined to her carriage and house, and lastly into a daughter sickly and confined to her bed.  For, remember, even with a general decrease of mortality you may often find a race thus degenerating and still oftener a family.  You may see poor little feeble washed-out rags, children of a noble stock, suffering morally and physically, throughout their useless, degenerate lives, and yet people who are going to marry and to bring more such into the world, will consult nothing but their own convenience as to where they are to live, or how they are to live.