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Selected Messages Book 2
are sacrificed, and tens of thousands have the foundation laid for a
short, invalid life, by the custom of bandaging and surfeiting the body
with much clothing, while the arms—which are at such distance from
the seat of life, and for that cause need even more clothing than the
chest and lungs—are left naked. Can mothers expect to have quiet and
healthy infants, who thus treat them?
When the limbs and arms are chilled, the blood is driven from
these parts to the lungs and head. The circulation is impeded, and
nature’s fine machinery does not move harmoniously. The system of
the infant is deranged, and it cries and mourns because of the abuse it
is compelled to suffer. The mother feeds it, thinking it must be hungry,
when food only increases its suffering. Tight bands and an overloaded
stomach do not agree. It has no room to breathe. It may scream,
struggle and pant for breath, and yet the mother not mistrust the cause.
She could relieve the sufferer at once, at least of tight bandages, if she
understood the nature of the case. She at length becomes alarmed, and
thinks her child really ill, and summons a doctor, who looks gravely
upon the infant a few moments and then deals out poisonous medicines,
or something called a soothing cordial, which the mother, faithful to
directions, pours down the throat of the abused infant. If it was not
diseased in reality before, it is after this process. It suffers now from
drug-disease, the most stubborn and incurable of all diseases. If it
recovers, it must bear about more or less in its system the effects of
that poisonous drug, and it is liable to spasms, heart disease, dropsy on
the brain, or consumption. Some infants are not strong enough to bear
even a trifle of drug-poisons, and as nature rallies to meet the intruder,
the vital forces of the tender infant are too severely taxed, and death
ends the scene.
It is no strange sight in this age of the world, to view the mother
lingering around the cradle of her suffering, dying infant, her heart
torn with anguish, as she listens to its feeble wail, and witnesses its
expiring struggles. It seems mysterious to her, that God should thus
afflict her innocent child. She does not think that her wrong course has
brought about the sad result. She just as surely destroyed her infant’s
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hold on life as though she had given it poison. Disease never comes
without a cause. The way is first prepared, and disease invited by
disregarding the laws of health. God does not take pleasure in the
sufferings and death of little children. He commits them to parents,