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Selected Messages Book 2
overtax their energies, and violate the laws of their being, they place
themselves in a condition where they cannot render to God perfect
service, and are pursuing a course of sin. Property thus obtained is at
an immense sacrifice.
Hard labor, and anxious care, often make the father nervous, im-
patient, and exacting. He does not notice the tired look of his wife,
who has labored with her feebler strength, just as hard as he has la-
bored, with his stronger energies. He suffers himself to be hurried with
business, and through his anxiety to be rich, loses in a great measure
the sense of his obligation to his family, and does not measure aright
his wife’s power of endurance. He often enlarges his farm, requiring
an increase of hired help, which necessarily increases the housework.
The wife realizes every day that she is doing too much work for her
strength, yet she toils on thinking the work must be done. She is
continually reaching down into the future, drawing upon her future
resources of strength and is living upon borrowed capital, and at the
period when she needs that strength, it is not at her command; and if
she does not lose her life, her constitution is broken, past recovery.
If the father would become acquainted with physical law, he might
better understand his obligations, and his responsibilities. He would
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see that he had been guilty of almost murdering his children, by suf-
fering so many burdens to come upon the mother, compelling her to
labor beyond her strength before their birth, in order to obtain means
to leave for them. They nurse these children through their suffering
life, and often lay them prematurely in the grave, little realizing their
wrong course has brought the sure result. How much better to have
shielded the mother of his children from wearing labor, and mental
anxiety, and let the children inherit good constitutions, and give them
an opportunity to battle their way through life, not relying upon their
father’s property, but upon their own energetic strength. The experi-
ence thus obtained would be of more worth to them than houses and
lands, purchased at the expense of the health of mother and children.
It seems perfectly natural for some men to be morose, selfish,
exacting, and overbearing. They have never learned the lesson of
self-control, and will not restrain their unreasonable feelings, let the
consequences be what they may. Such men will be repaid, by seeing
their companions sickly, and dispirited, and their children bearing the
peculiarities of their own disagreeable traits of character.