19. ALL CHILDREN MAY DIE.--Children may indeed die whose parents are healthy, but they almost must whose parents are essentially ailing in one or more of their vital organs; because, since they inherit this organ debilitated or diseased, any additional cause of sickness attacks this part first, and when it gives out, all go by the board together. 20. PARENTS MUST LEARN AND OBEY.--How infinitely more virtuous and happy would your children be if you should be healthy in body, and happy in mind, so as to beget in {227} them a constitutionally healthy and vigorous physiology, along with a serene and happy frame of mind! Words are utterly powerless in answer, and so is everything but a lifetime of consequent happiness or misery! Learn and obey, then, the laws of life and health, that you may both reap the rich reward yourself, and also shower down upon your children after you, blessings many and most exalted. Avoid excesses of all kinds, be temperate, take good care of the body and avoid exposures and disease, and your children will be models of health and beauty. 21. THE RIGHT CONDITION.--The great practical inference is, that those parents who desire intellectual and moral children, must love each other; because, this love, besides perpetually calling forth and cultivating their higher faculties, awakens them to the highest pitch of exalted action in that climax, concentration, and consummation of love which propagates their existing qualities, the mental endowment of offspring being proportionate to the purity and intensity of parental love. 22. THE EFFECTS.--The children of affectionate parents receive existence and constitution when love has rendered the mentality of their parents both more elevated and more active than it is by nature, of course the children of loving parents are both more intellectual and moral by nature than their parents. Now, if these children and their companions also love one another, this same law which renders the second generation better than the first, will of course render the third still better than the second, and thus of all succeeding generations. 23. ANIMAL IMPULSE.--You may preach and pray till doomsday--may send out missionaries, may circulate tracts and Bibles, and multiply revivals and all the means of grace, with little avail; because, as long as mankind go on, as now, to propagate by animal impulse, so long must their offspring be animal, sensual, devilish! But only induce parents cordially to love each other, and you thereby render their children constitutionally talented and virtuous. Oh! parents, by as much as you prefer the luxuries of concord to the torments of discord, and children that are sweet dispositioned and highly intellectual to those that are rough, wrathful, and depraved, be entreated to "_love one another_." [Illustration] * * * * * {229} Too Many Children. [Illustration: JUST HOME FROM SCHOOL.]