Pause, my friend, and let your thoughts dwell on this subject. You would exalt and perfect human nature. You live but to people this earth with nobler types of men and women. It is the only true and great end of life. If you would labor for this sublime object, pause and consider this crime, in its bearing on the mother towards your child, and through her, on the character and destiny of that child. Enter into and comprehend, if you can, the feelings which an undesired maternity must excite in the mind of your wife towards your child. Measure, if you can, the wrong done your child by giving it being under such circumstances. See its helplessness, its innocence, and the crime you perpetrate against it. Can that child love and respect you? Can it ever forgive you? Can it ever be reconciled to you? In vain you talk to such a child about filial gratitude and obedience. It will answer by pointing you to _paternal_ wrong, inflicted on its helplessness. Disobedience, ingratitude and defiance are constitutional,—bred in its bones, organized into every fibre of its being. Consider well the power your wife holds over your child, and over its destiny as a man or woman, and ask—Shall that power be for good or evil? Shall it be exerted to give your child a beautiful, healthy, vigorous body, or a body corrupted and deformed by a painful and loathsome disease? Shall it be used to secure to your child’s soul tenderness, truth, justice, generosity and nobleness, or wrath, revenge, meanness and falsehood?—to impress on its moral nature the stamp of Divinity, or the stamp of a thief, a slaveholder, a pirate, a murderer, or an assassin? It is for you, the husband and father, to answer these questions. _Mainly_, if not entirely, you are to decide whether this great power shall be a blessing or a curse to your child. How? _Never impose on your wife a maternity, except at the call of her own nature._ When she is ready to take charge of the germ of a new life, and can joyfully welcome the responsibilities and trials of its development and birth, then, and _never till then_, impart it to her. Then will a tenderness ineffable, a love that is all-hoping, all-enduring and all-pervading, and a joy unspeakable and full of glory, preside, like a wise and loving Providence, over the conception, ante-natal growth and education, and the birth of your child. A heart, tender, loving and vigilant as the heart of God, will watch over it for good. The perfection and happiness of your child will be the one controlling motive of her life, and whether she eat or drink, labor or rest, or whatever she does, she will do all to the glory of that priceless and most welcome charge you have committed to her care.