Marriage Relation
31
just as important to the happiness of man and wife, as food is necessary
to sustain physical strength. The father should encourage wife and
[121]
mother to lean upon his large affections. Kind, cheerful, encouraging
words from him with whom she has intrusted her life happiness, will
be more beneficial to her than any medicine; and the cheerful rays of
light which such sympathizing words will bring to the heart of the wife
and mother, will reflect back their own cheering beams upon the heart
of the father.
The husband will frequently see his wife care-worn and debilitated,
growing prematurely old, in laboring to prepare food to suit the vitiated
taste. He gratifies the appetite, and will eat and drink those things
which it costs much time and labor to prepare for the table, and which
have a tendency to make those who partake of them nervous and
irritable. The wife and mother is seldom free from the headache, and
the children are suffering the effects of eating unwholesome food,
and there is a great lack of patience and affection with parents and
children. All are sufferers together, for health has been sacrificed to
lustful appetite. The offspring, before its birth, has had transmitted to
it disease and an unhealthy appetite. And the irritability, nervousness,
and despondency, manifested by the mother, will mark the character
of her child.
In past generations, if mothers had informed themselves in re-
gard to the laws of their being, they would have understood that their
[122]
constitutional strength, as well as the tone of their morals, and their
mental faculties, would in a great measure be represented in their off-
spring. Their ignorance upon this subject, where so much is involved,
is criminal. Many women never should have become mothers. Their
blood was filled with scrofula, transmitted to them from their parents,
and increased by their gross manner of living. The intellect has been
brought down and enslaved to serve the animal appetites, and children,
born of such parents, have been poor sufferers, and of but little use to
society.
It has been one of the greatest causes of degeneracy in generations
back, up to the present time, that wives and mothers who otherwise
would have had a beneficial influence upon society, in raising the
standard of morals, have been lost to society through multiplicity of
home cares, because of the fashionable, health-destroying manner of
cooking, and also in consequence of too frequent child-bearing. She