But not only are the vital forces of your wife exhausted by other labors and anxieties, but your own energies are, from various causes, prostrated. Yet, excited by some artificial stimulant, and when the vital forces of your manhood are powerless, you demand this relation with your wife. Maternity is the result. What have you done for your child? Imparted to it, not the true life and vigor of your manhood, but its momentary imbecility. Your child, it may be, is rendered imbecile in body and idiotic in mind, solely through your fault. You exhausted your life, and then gave that exhausted, soulless life to your child. You exercised no wise and manly forethought for your child. Its well-being entered not into your designs; only your own gratification. Hence, for your child’s sake, you used no exertions, by abstinence from exhausting toil or enfeebling amusements and indulgences, to exalt and perfect your physical and mental energies; but by debilitating pleasures, by sleepless nights, spent in pursuit of amusement, by dissipating games, and by exhausting indulgences in the use of narcotic and alcoholic drugs, drinks and food, you are rendered imbecile to think, to feel, or to act. And these conditions you entail on your child as its birthright, lifelong, fearful legacy, from the effects of which no power can rescue it. Can you do a greater wrong to your child? Can you commit against it a greater crime? A living death is its doom. When should man be a _living_ soul, if not in that relation in which he originates a new immortal? In that moment, so replete with human destiny, if ever, every nerve of his being should be filled and thrilled with that creative energy, that concentrated, vitalizing power which said, “Let there be light, and there was light;” and which says of creation, “He spake, and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast.” So man, in that moment of sublime consecration of his manhood to its purest and most august function, should have a great, energetic, living soul, in a living body. He performs an act of deeper significance than that which gave existence and glory to the sun and stars—an act, from which is to arise a living soul, deathless as God in its being, and capable of reaching unimaginable heights of wisdom and love.