Samson
503
God had an important work for the promised child of Manoah
to do, and it was to secure for him the qualifications necessary for
this work that the habits of both the mother and the child were to be
carefully regulated. “Neither let her drink wine or strong drink,” was
the Angel’s instruction for the wife of Manoah, “nor eat any unclean
thing. All that I commanded her let her observe.” The child will be
affected for good or for evil by the habits of the mother. She must
herself be controlled by principle and must practice temperance and
self-denial, if she would seek the welfare of her child. Unwise advisers
will urge upon the mother the necessity of gratifying every wish and
impulse, but such teaching is false and mischievous. The mother is by
the command of God Himself placed under the most solemn obligation
to exercise self-control.
And fathers as well as mothers are involved in this responsibility.
Both parents transmit their own characteristics, mental and physical,
their dispositions and appetites, to their children. As the result of
parental intemperance children often lack physical strength and mental
and moral power. Liquor drinkers and tobacco users may, and do,
transmit their insatiable craving, their inflamed blood and irritable
nerves, to their children. The licentious often bequeath their unholy
desires, and even loathsome diseases, as a legacy to their offspring.
And as the children have less power to resist temptation than had the
parents, the tendency is for each generation to fall lower and lower. To
a great degree parents are responsible not only for the violent passions
and perverted appetites of their children but for the infirmities of the
thousands born deaf, blind, diseased, or idiotic.
The inquiry of every father and mother should be, “What shall we
do unto the child that shall be born unto us?” The effect of prenatal
influences has been by many lightly regarded; but the instruction sent
from heaven to those Hebrew parents, and twice repeated in the most
explicit and solemn manner, shows how this matter is looked upon by
our Creator.
And it was not enough that the promised child should receive
a good legacy from the parents. This must be followed by careful
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training and the formation of right habits. God directed that the future
judge and deliverer of Israel should be trained to strict temperance
from infancy. He was to be a Nazarite from his birth, thus being
placed under a perpetual prohibition against the use of wine or strong