Marriage Relation
23
cursed their posterity with poverty, imbecility, and degradation. These
should not have married. At least, they should not have brought inno-
cent children into existence to share their misery, and hand down their
own deficiencies, with accumulating wretchedness, from generation to
generation. This is one great cause of the degeneracy of the race.
[106]
If women of past generations had always moved from high con-
siderations, realizing that future generations would be ennobled or
debased by their course of action, they would have taken their stand,
that they could not unite their life interest with men who were cher-
ishing unnatural appetites for alcoholic drinks, and tobacco which is
a slow, but sure and deadly, poison, weakening the nervous system,
and debasing the noble faculties of the mind. If men would remain
wedded to these vile habits, women should have left them to their
life of single blessedness, to enjoy these companions of their choice.
Women should not have considered themselves of so little value as to
unite their destiny with men who had no control over their appetites,
but whose principal happiness consisted in eating and drinking, and
gratifying their animal passions. Women have not always followed the
dictates of reason. They have sometimes been led by blind impulse.
They have not always felt in a high degree the responsibilities rest-
ing upon them, to form such life connections as would not enstamp
upon their offspring a low degree of morals, and a passion to gratify
debased appetites, at the expense of health, and even life. God will
hold them accountable in a large degree for the physical health and
moral characters thus transmitted to future generations.
[107]
Men and women who have corrupted their own bodies by disso-
lute habits, have also debased their intellects and destroyed the fine
sensibilities of the soul. Very many of this class have married, and left
for an inheritance to their offspring the taints of their own physical
debility and depraved morals. The gratification of animal passions and
gross sensuality have been the marked characteristics of their poster-
ity, which have descended from generation to generation, increasing
human misery to a fearful degree, and hastening the deterioration of
the race.
Men and women who have become sickly and diseased, have
often in their marriage connections selfishly thought only of their own
happiness. They have not seriously considered the matter from the
standpoint of noble, elevated principles, reasoning in regard to what