Purity of Heart and Life
143
this degrading vice. The sensitive nerves of the brain have lost their
healthy tone by morbid excitation to gratify an unnatural desire for
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sensual indulgence
Moral pollution has done more than every other evil to cause the
race to degenerate. It is practiced to an alarming extent and brings on
disease of almost every description.
Parents do not generally suspect that their children understand
anything about this vice. In very many cases the parents are the real
sinners. They have abused their marriage privileges, and by indul-
gence have strengthened their animal passions. And as these have
strengthened, the moral and intellectual faculties have become weak.
The spiritual has been overborne by the brutish. Children are born
with the animal propensities largely developed, the parents’ own stamp
of character having been given to them. Children born to these parents
will almost invariably take naturally to the disgusting habits of secret
vice. The sins of the parents will be visited upon their children because
the parents have given them the stamp of their own lustful propensities.
Those who have become fully established in this soul-and-body-
destroying vice can seldom rest until their burden of secret evil is
imparted to those with whom they associate. Curiosity is at once
aroused, and the knowledge of vice is passed from youth to youth,
from child to child, until there is scarcely one to be found ignorant of
the practice of this degrading sin
The practice of secret habits surely destroys the vital forces of the
system. All unnecessary vital action will be followed by corresponding
depression. Among the young the vital capital, the brain, is so severely
taxed at an early age that there is a deficiency and great exhaustion,
which leaves the system exposed to disease of various kinds.
If the practice is continued from the ages of fifteen and upward,
nature will protest against the abuse she has suffered, and continues to
suffer, and will make them pay the penalty for the transgression of her
laws, especially from the ages of thirty to forty-five, by numerous pains
in the system and various diseases, such as affection of the liver and
lungs, neuralgia, rheumatism, affection of the spine, diseased kidneys,
and cancerous humors. Some of nature’s fine machinery gives way,
168
Testimonies for the Church 2:347
169
Testimonies for the Church 2:391, 392