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
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 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: JUST HOME FROM SCHOOL.]
* * * * *
TOO MANY CHILDREN.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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