But although the young are not wholly destitute of a sense of the evils of what they call excess, and of the shame of what is well known to be its frequent and formidable results,--so far as themselves are concerned,--yet they seem wholly ignorant of any considerable danger short of this. For so far are they from admitting that the force of conscience is weakened by every repeated known and wilful transgression, many think, (as I have already stated) promiscuous intercourse, where no matrimonial rights are invaded, if it be so managed as to exempt the parties immediately concerned from all immediate suffering both moral and physical, can scarcely be called a transgression, at all. I wish it were practicable to extend these remarks far enough to show, as plain as noon-day light can make it, that every criminal act of this kind--I mean every instance of irregularity--not only produces evil to society generally, in the present generation, but also inflicts evil on those that follow. For to say nothing of those horrid cases where the infants of licentious parents not only inherit vicious dispositions, but ruined bodies--even to a degree, that in some instances excludes a possibility of the child's surviving many days;--there are other forms of disease often entailed on the young which as certainly consign the sufferer to an early grave, though the passage thither may be more tedious and lingering. How must it wring the heart of a feeling young parent to see his first born child, which for any thing he knows, might have been possessed of a sound and vigorous body, like other children, enter the world with incipient scrofula, diseased joints or bones, and eruptive diseases, in some of their worst forms? Must not the sight sink him to the very dust? And would he not give worlds--had he worlds to give--to reverse those irreversible but inscrutable decrees of Heaven, which visit the sins of parents upon their descendants--'unto the third and fourth generation?' But how easy is it, by timely reflection, and fixed moral principle, to prevent much of that disease which 'worlds' cannot wholly cure, when it is once inflicted! I hazard nothing in saying, then--and I might appeal to the whole medical profession to sustain me in my assertion--that no person whose system ever suffers, once, from those forms of disease which approach nearest to the character of special judgments of Heaven on sin or shame, can be sure of ever wholly recovering from their effects on his own person; and what is still worse, can ever be sure of being the parent of a child whose constitution shall be wholly untainted with disease, of one kind or another.