Children should have milk, bread, water, and potatoes; and everything that would lay the foundation for disease should be strenuously kept from their stomachs, that no appetites may be formed for pernicious substances, which, when formed, cannot be overcome easily, if at all. 2:21. I will tell you how you can enjoy health. You let your children have a little milk in the morning. Give them a little bread with it--not soft bread; teach your children to eat crust--hard baked bread, that the Americans would call stale, but the English would not. Teach them to eat this, {299} and to eat sparingly. Instead of drinking unhealthy water, boil such water, and let it stand until it is cool. If the children are in the least troubled with summer complaint, and are weak in their bowels, make a weak composition tea, sweeten it with loaf sugar and put a little nice cream in it; and let the children make a practice of drinking composition instead of cold water. Mothers, keep the children from eating meat; and let them eat vegetables that are fully matured, not unripe, and bread that is well baked, not soft. Do not put your loaf into the oven with a fire hot enough to burn it before it is baked through, but with a slow heat, and let it remain until it is perfectly baked; and I would prefer, for my own eating, each and every loaf to be not thicker than my two hands--you tell how thick they are--and I would want the crust as thick as my hand. 19:67. Be careful of your bodies; be prudent in laying out your energies, for when you are old you will need the strength and power you are now wasting. Preserve your lives. Until you know and practice this, you are not thoroughly good soldiers nor wise stewards. 8:136-137. {300} CHAPTER XVII _THE FAMILY_ _Virtue_--Purity preserves, sustains and increases. 16:108. The principle of pure affection is the gift of God, and it is for us to learn to control it and exercise proper dominion over it. 6:149. Learn the will of God, keep his commandments and do his will, and you will be a virtuous person. 3:204. Any man who humbles a daughter of Eve to rob her of her virtue, and cast her off dishonored and defiled, is her destroyer, and is responsible to God for the deed. If the refined Christian society of the nineteenth century will tolerate such a crime, God will not; but he will call the perpetrator to an account. He will be damned; in hell he will lift up his eyes, being in torment, until he has paid the uttermost farthing, and made a full atonement for his sins. 11:268.