Please read carefully the following sentence, and consider how much of you is involved in right breathing. See how certainly breath, by proper breathing, is "the breath of life":
He breathes only from the top of his lungs. It is seldom that he exercises the abdominal muscles in the act of breathing. Stomach, liver, lungs, and brain are suffering for the want of deep, full inspirations of air, which would electrify the blood and impart to it a bright, lively color, and which alone can keep it pure and give tone and vigor to every part of the living machinery.[1]
How much of a person suffers from failing to exercise the abdominal muscles in breathing! Think of it,--"stomach, liver, lungs, and brain"! Take these things away from a man, and how much is he worth?
Put it in another way: Take away from man the proper and free use of these organs, and what is he in comparison to what God intended that he should be? He is as nothing compared to what God made him to be. And yet the "stomach, liver, lungs, and brain" of thousands of people--some of them Seventh-day Adventists, too--are suffering because they do not now how to breathe correctly.
Study up on these things. God has given us these organs to be kept in health, and to be used to glorify Him. But it is not health to have the stomach, liver, lungs, and brain suffering.
Now to sum up:
Question: What is right breathing?
Answer: "Exercising the abdominal muscles."
Q: What is wrong breathing?
A: "The use of the top of the lungs."
Q: What is the right way and manner of speaking?
A: "By using the abdominal muscles."
Q: What is the wrong way?
A: "To use the top of the lungs and the throat."
Q: Where are the words to come from?
A: "Let your words come from deep down."
Q: Where shall they not come from?
A: "Not from high up. Not from the throat, nor from the upper extremity of the vocal organs."
Q: What is to do the work?
A: "The abdominal muscles."
Q: What is not to do the work, not to be worn?
A: "The lungs and throat, the vocal organs."
That you may see yet more plainly how important this is, we quote a statement clipped from one of the leading papers of the United States--a Christian and temperance paper, too. Under the heading, "Physical Culture for Children", it says:
"I would begin when a child is two years old, and teach her [her, mark it. You will readily see that there is a point in so teaching her rather than him] to stand poised from the hips, and slightly forward, chest up, abdomen contracted, toes turned out at an angle of sixty degrees, and neck erect, so that the collar-bone should be horizontal. ... Then I would teach her to breathe slowly, inflating the chest upward and outward, not downward, keeping the abdomen contracted."
Think of it,--chest up, abdomen contracted, toes turned out, neck erect, breathe slowly, inflating the chest upward and outward, not downward! To take a grown person who is breathing rightly, and put him or her through that drill, would be torture to him or "her."
A child two years old breathes rightly just as she is; she breathes naturally, as God made her to breathe. But lo! this proposes to take her at that age, and train her into this absolute perversion and inversion of nature. Let not such speak anymore against the Flathead Indians, nor against the Chinese binding the feet of their female children.
If a child, taken at that age and trained in that way, should chance to survive the dreadful ordeal, she will be shaped, when she gets her growth, directly opposite to what God made her to be,--she will be shaped like an inverted cone, like a common ink-bottle upside down,--and will be a living invitation to consumption.
It is plain to see, however, why such directions are given as physical culture for children. Some devotee of fashion invented this plan so as to have the women wasp-waisted, as fashion dictates. People will take the girl at two years old, and train, or rather, torture, her into this shape, so she will have as small a waist as possible. These same people will praise the Venus of Milo, and then take their children and train them in exactly an opposite shape,--opposite, too, to the shape which God made them to bear.
Now, in the way the Lord made us, as we have already seen in these studies, the vital organs--the heart and lungs--are in the upper part of the body, and are fenced in strongly with the large, powerful upper ribs, which are further strengthened and braced by the breast-bone; but the breast-bone does not extend all the way down as far as the ribs number. The lower ribs are loose at the front ends. This makes them pliable, and therefore they are called "floating" ribs.
Now which is it easier to move--the ribs that are so strongly braced as to be almost immovable, or the ribs that are left free and floating purposely to be moved? There is only one possible answer. Therefore, does not nature itself, and common sense, too, teach that breathing should be downward instead of "upward and outward," as this extract says?
Nothing more than this simple consideration is needed to demonstrate that this method of physical culture for children, or anybody else, is contrary to nature. And by every passage which we have quoted, we know that it is contrary to revelation.
The general shape of the thorax, of the inside of the chest, and of the vital organs contained therein, is that of a cone right side up; that is, the small end up, and the large, broad part down. But the method given in the extract under consideration would develop just the reverse of that. This would put the broad part up and the point down. Do you not see that this reverses nature, and makes the shape just the opposite of what God made it?
Nothing more is needed to demonstrate that such a method of breathing is contrary to nature and revelation, to reason and common sense. And here we leave the subject for the present. Study these things carefully, consider them prayerfully, apply them conscientiously, and glorify God by having good health.--Advent Review, March 8, 1898.
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