Searchlights on Health: The Science of EugenicsJefferis, B. G. (Benjamin Grant)
Philosophy
Searchlights on Health: The Science of Eugenics
Jefferis, B. G. (Benjamin Grant)
Eugenics; Hygiene; Marriage; Medicine, Popular; Sexual ethics
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]
* * * * *
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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