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Testimonies for the Church Volume 2
before they are born. You have not added to virtue knowledge, and
your children have not been taught how to preserve themselves in
the best condition of health. Never should one morsel of swine’s
flesh be placed upon your table.
Your children have come up, instead of being brought up and
educated to the end that they might become Christians. In many
respects your cattle have received better treatment than your children.
You have not done your duty to your children, but have left them to
grow up in ignorance. You have not realized the responsibility you
took upon yourself in bringing into the world so numerous a flock,
that you were in a great measure accountable for their salvation.
You cannot throw off this responsibility. You have robbed your
children of their rights by not interesting yourself in their education
and instructing them patiently and faithfully in regard to forming
characters for heaven. Your course has done much to destroy their
confidence in you. You are exacting, overbearing, tyrannical; you
fret, and scold, and censure, and by so doing wean their affections
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from you. You treat them as though they had no just rights, as though
they were machines to turn in your hands according to your pleasure.
You provoke them to wrath, and often discourage them. You do not
give them love and affection. Love begets love, affection begets
affection. The spirit which you manifest toward your children will
be reflected upon you.
You are in a critical condition, and have no true sense of it. It
is impossible for an intemperate man to be a patient man. First
temperance, then patience. You have so long lived for self, and
followed the imagination of your own heart, that you cannot discern
sacred things. Your lustful appetite and passions have controlled you.
The higher order of mental organs has been weakened and controlled
by the lower, baser organs. The animal propensities have been
gaining strength. When reason is left to be controlled by appetite,
the high sense of sacred things is impaired. The mind is debased,
the affections are unsanctified, and the words and acts testify what
is in the heart. God has been displeased and dishonored by your
conversation and your deportment. Your words have not been select
and well chosen; low, vulgar conversation comes naturally to your
lips, even in the presence of children and youth. Your influence in
this respect has been bad.