And on the other hand, for the promotion of life, what encouragement has God not given? First, this commandment, "Be fruitful and multiply and replenish (refill) the earth;" second, in making sex desire and love of offspring the strongest of passions, refining both, however, by the sentiment of love, and confining by his law the exercise of these life-functions to the limits of wedlock relations. "Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord; and the fruit of the womb is his reward. As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them; they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate" (Psalms 127:3-5). And when the Lord would give his highest blessing to Abraham, his friend, for his supreme act of obedience, he could but say: "In blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies; and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; because thou hast obeyed my voice" (Genesis, xxii:17-18). And to Jacob the Lord also said: "Behold, I will make thee fruitful, and multiply thee, and I will make of thee a multitude of people" (Gen. xlviii:4). _2. Nature's Testimony to the Value of Life:_ In nature, too, this law of life is written, until our philosophers who treat on life in its various forms, declare that the very "object of nature is function"--i. e., life, (Lester F. Ward, Outlines of Sociology, 1904, Ch. V). So superabundant is the fertility of all forms of life, animal and vegetable, that if it were not limited by destructive agencies the earth would soon be overwhelmed. "Every being," says Mr. Darwin, "which during its natural life time produces several eggs or seeds, must suffer destruction during some period of its life, and during some season or occasional year, otherwise, on the principle of geometrical increase, its numbers would quickly become so inordinately great that no country could support the product. * * * There is no exception to the rule that every organic being naturally increases at so high a rate, that, if not destroyed, the earth would soon be covered by the progeny of a single pair. Even slow-breeding man has doubled in twenty-five years, and at this rate, in less than a thousand years, there would literally not be standing room for his progeny. * * * In a state of nature almost every full-grown plant annually produces seed, and amongst animals there are very few which do not annually pair. Hence we may confidently assert, that all plants and animals are tending to increase at a geometrical ratio,--that all would rapidly stock every station in which they could any how exist--and that this geometrical tendency to increase must be checked by destruction at some period of life" ("The Origin of Species," p. 50, 51, 52).