26
A Solemn Appeal
happiness of the wife, by increasing her burdens and cares by numerous
offspring. “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the
church, and gave himself for it. So ought men to love their wives as
their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself. For no man
ever yet hated his own flesh, but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as
the Lord the church.”
We see this holy injunction almost wholly disregarded, even by
professed Christians. Everywhere you may look, you will see pale,
sickly, careworn, broken-down, dispirited, discouraged women. They
are generally overworked, and their vital energies exhausted by fre-
quent child-bearing. The world is filled with images of human beings
who are of no worth to society. Many are deficient in intellect, and
many who possess natural talents do not use them for any beneficial
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purposes. They are not cultivated, and the one great reason is, children
have been multiplied faster than they could be well trained, and have
been left to come up much like the brutes.
The Care of Children
Children in this age are suffering with their parents, more or less,
the penalty of the violation of the laws of health. The course generally
pursued with them, from their infancy, is in continual opposition to
the laws of their being. They were compelled to receive a miserable
inheritance of disease and debility, before their birth, occasioned by
the wrong habits of their parents, which will affect them in a greater
or less degree through life. This bad state of things is made every way
worse by parents’ continuing to follow a wrong course in the physical
training of their children during their childhood.
Parents manifest astonishing ignorance, indifference, and reckless-
ness, in regard to the physical health of their children, which often
results in destroying the little vitality left the abused infant, and con-
signs it to an early grave. You will frequently hear parents mourning
over the providence of God which has torn their children from their
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embrace. Our Heavenly Father is too wise to err, and too good to do
us wrong. He has no delight in seeing his creatures suffer. Thousands
have been ruined for life because parents have not acted in accordance
with the laws of health. They have moved from impulse, instead of