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Extremes in Health Reform
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They should calmly consider what provision can be made for their
children. They have no right to bring children into the world to be a
burden to others. Have they a business that they can rely upon to sus-
tain a family so that they need not become a burden to others? If they
have not, they commit a crime in bringing children into the world
to suffer for want of proper care, food, and clothing. In this fast,
corrupt age these things are not considered. Lustful passion bears
sway and will not submit to control, although feebleness, misery,
and death are the result of its reign. Women are forced to a life of
hardship, pain, and suffering because of the uncontrollable passions
of men who bear the name of husband—more rightly could they be
called brutes. Mothers drag out a miserable existence, with children
in their arms nearly all the time, managing every way to put bread
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into their mouths and clothes upon their backs. Such accumulated
misery fills the world.
There is but little real, genuine, devoted, pure love. This precious
article is very rare. Passion is termed love. Many a woman has
had her fine and tender sensibilities outraged, because the marriage
relation allowed him whom she called husband to be brutal in his
treatment of her. His love she found to be of so base a quality that
she became disgusted.
Very many families are living in a most unhappy state because
the husband and father allows the animal in his nature to predominate
over the intellectual and moral. The result is that a sense of languor
and depression is frequently felt, but the cause is seldom divined
as being the result of their own improper course of action. We are
under solemn obligations to God to keep the spirit pure and the body
healthy, that we may be a benefit to humanity, and render to God
perfect service. The apostle utters these words of warning: “Let not
sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey it in
the lusts thereof.” He urges us onward by telling us that “every man
that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things.” He exhorts
all who call themselves Christians to present their bodies” a living
sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God.” He says: “I keep under my
body, and bring it into subjection: lest that by any means, when I
have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway.”
It is an error generally committed to make no difference in the life
of a woman previous to the birth of her children. At this important