THE IMPROVEMENT OF OFFSPRING.
Why Bring Into the World Idiots, Fools, Criminals and Lunatics?
1. THE RIGHT WAY.—When mankind will properly love AND marry and then
rightly generate, carry, nurse and educate their children, will they
in deed and in truth carry out the holy and happy purpose of their
Creator. See those miserable and depraved scape-goats of humanity, the demented simpletons, the half-crazy, unbalanced multitudes which infest our earth, and fill our prisons with criminals and our poor-houses with paupers. Oh! the boundless capabilities and perfections of our God-like nature and, alas! its deformities! All is the result of the ignorance or indifference of parents. As long as children are the accidents of lust instead of the premeditated objects of love, so long will the offspring deteriorate and the world be cursed with deformities, monstrosities, unhumanities and cranks.
2. EACH AFTER ITS KIND.—"Like parents like children." "In their own
image beget" they them. In what other can they? "How can a corrupt
tree bring forth good fruit?" How can animal propensities in parents
generate other than depraved children, or moral purity beget beings
other than as holy by nature as those at whose hands they received
existence and constitution?
3. AS ARE THE PARENTS, physically, mentally and morally when they
stamp their own image and likeness upon progeny, so will be the
constitution of that progeny.
4. "JUST AS THE TWIG IS BENT THE TREE'S INCLINED."—Yet the bramble
cannot be bent to bear delicious peaches, nor the sycamore to bear
grain. Education is something, but parentage is everything; because it "dyes in the wool" and thereby exerts an influence on character almost infinitely more powerful than all other conditions put together.
5. HEALTHY AND BEAUTIFUL CHILDREN.—Thoughtless mortal! Before
you allow the first goings forth of love, learn what the parental
conditions in you mean, and you will confer a great boon upon the
prospective bone of your bone, and flesh of your flesh! If it is in
your power to be the parent of beautiful, healthy, moral and talented
children instead of diseased and depraved, is it not your imperious
duty then, to impart to them that physical power, moral perfection, and intellectual capability, which shall ennoble their lives and make them good people and good citizens?
6. PAUSE AND TREMBLE.—Prospective parents! Will you trifle with
the dearest interests of your children? Will you in matters thus
momentous, head-long rush
"Where angels dare not tread,"
Seeking only mere animal indulgence?—Well might cherubim shrink from
assuming responsibilities thus momentous Yet, how many parents tread
this holy ground completely unprepared, and almost as thoughtlessly
and Ignorantly as brutes—entailing even loathsome diseases and
sensual propensities upon the fruit of their own bodies. Whereas they
are bound, by obligations the most imperious to bestow on them a
good physical organization, along with a pure, moral, and strong
intellectual constitution, or else not to become parents! Especially
since it is easier to generate human angels than devils incarnate.
7. HEREDITARY DESCENT.—This great law of things, "Hereditary
Descent," fully proves and illustrates in any required number and
variety or cases, showing that progeny inherits the constitutional
natures and characters, mental and physical, of parents, including
pre-dispositions to consumption, insanity, all sorts of disease, etc., as well as longevity, strength, stature, looks, disposition, talents,—all that is constitutional. From what other source do or can they come? Indeed, who can doubt a truth as palpable as that children inherit some, and if some, therefore all, the physical and mental nature and constitutor of parents, thus becoming almost their fac-similes?