Miss Beecher's Housekeeper and Healthkeeper: Containing Five Hundred Receipes for Economical and Healthful Cooking; also, Many Directions for Securing Health and HappinessBeecher, Catharine Esther
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Miss Beecher's Housekeeper and Healthkeeper: Containing Five Hundred Receipes for Economical and Healthful Cooking; also, Many Directions for Securing Health and Happiness
Beecher, Catharine Esther
Cooking; Home economics
As one course, then, is perfectly safe, and another involves great
danger, it is wrong and sinful to choose the path of danger. There
is no peril in drinking pure water, milk, the juices of fruits, and
infusions that are nourishing and harmless. But there is great danger
to the young, and to the commonwealth, in patronizing the sale and
use of alcoholic drinks. The religion of Christ, in its distinctive
feature, involves generous self-denial for the good of others,
especially for the weaker members of society. It is on this principle
that St. Paul sets forth his own example: “If meat make my brother to
offend, I will eat no flesh while the world standeth, lest I make my
brother to offend.” And again he teaches, “We, then, that are strong
ought to bear the infirmities of the weak, and not to please ourselves.”
This Christian principle also applies to the common drinks of the
family, tea and coffee. It has been shown that the great end for which
Jesus Christ came, and for which he instituted the family state, is
the training of our whole race to virtue and happiness, with chief
reference to an immortal existence. In this mission, of which woman
is chief minister, the distinctive feature is self-sacrifice of the
wiser and stronger members to save and to elevate the weaker ones. The
children and the servants are these weaker members, who by ignorance
and want of habits of self-control are in most danger. It is in this
aspect that we are to consider the expediency of using tea and coffee
in a family.
These drinks are a most extensive cause of much of the nervous debility
and suffering endured by American women; and relinquishing them would
save an immense amount of such suffering. Moreover, all housekeepers
will allow that they can not regulate these drinks in their kitchens,
where the ignorant use them to excess. There is little probability that
the present generation will make so decided a change in their habits
as to give up these beverages; but the subject is presented rather in
reference to forming the habits of children.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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