8. CAUTION AND ADVICE.--No couple should allow their associations to develop into an engagement and marriage if either one has any inclination to jealousy. It shows invariably a want of sufficient confidence, and that want of confidence, instead of being diminished after marriage, is liable to increase, until by the aid of the imagination and wrong interpretation the home is made a hell and divorce a necessity. Let it be remembered, there can be no true love without perfect and absolute confidence. Jealousy is always the sign of weakness or madness. Avoid a jealous disposition, for it is an open acknowledgment of a lack of faith. [Illustration] {222} The Improvement of Offspring. * * * * * Why Bring Into the World Idiots, Fools, Criminals and Lunatics? [Illustration: The Mother's Good Night Prayer.] 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 {223} 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.