Labor Conducive to Health
89
the only redeeming thing in their lives and was the means of saving
them from utter ruin. While their minds were thus engaged, they could
not have as favorable an opportunity to debase their bodies and to
complete the work of destroying themselves. To have all such persons
cease to labor with brain and muscle is to give them ample opportunity
to be taken captive by the temptations of Satan.
Dr. J has recommended that the sexes mingle together; he has
taught that physical and mental health demands a closer association
with one another. Such teaching has done and is doing great injury
to inexperienced youth and children, and is a great satisfaction to
men and women of questionable character, whose passions have never
been controlled, and who for this reason are suffering from various
debilitating disorders. These persons are instructed, from a health
standpoint, to be much in the company of the opposite sex. Thus a
door of temptation is opened before them, passion rouses like a lion
within their hearts, every consideration is overborne, and everything
elevated and noble is sacrificed to lust. This is an age when the world
is teeming with corruption. Were the minds and bodies of men and
women in a healthy condition, were the animal passions subject to the
higher intellectual powers of the mind, it might be comparatively safe
to teach that boys and girls, and the youth of still more mature age,
would be benefited by mingling much in the society of one another.
If the minds of the youth of this age were pure and uncorrupted,
the girls might have a softening influence upon the minds and manners
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of the boys, and the boys, with their stronger, firmer natures, might
have a tendency to ennoble and strengthen the character of the girls.
But it is a painful fact that there is not one girl in a hundred who is
pure-minded, and there is not one boy in a hundred whose morals are
untainted. Many who are older have gone to such lengths in dissipation
that they are polluted, soul and body; and corruption has taken hold
of a large class who pass among men and women as polite gentlemen
and beautiful ladies. It is not the time to recommend as beneficial to
health the mingling of the sexes, their being as much as possible in the
society of one another. The curse of this corrupt age is the absence of
true virtue and modesty.
Dr. I, you have advanced these ideas in the parlor. The young have
heard you, and your remarks have had as great an influence upon your
own children as upon others. It would have been better to have left