BY MRS. S.M. I. HENRY
AFTER all that has been said of heredity and environment, and in harmony with it, is the fact that in child culture as well as in horticulture at least as much depends on the seed as on cultivation. The gardener can afford to experiment in the seeds of plant and tree; but to experiment in human beginnings may involve eternal loss, in spite of all that can be done later on.
Manhood means fatherhood, womanhood means motherhood; and the teaching by which the child is to be given a fair start in life should begin in the youth of its parents. That holy and blessed seed of which mention is made in Ps. 37:25, 26, 28; Isa. 6:13; 44:3; 61:7-9; Rom. 4:14-16, cannot be matured in a defiled temple, amid impure practises of thought and habit. The reading of sensational literature; the society of evil companions; the degeneration of brain, blood, muscle, and bone, through unhygienic food; the use of tobacco and alcoholic drinks,— anything in the life of body or soul which Christ himself would not have indulged, which he, as our Creator, has not appointed or approved for us, will so nearly spoil the life principle from which the child is to spring that he shall, at best, have a long and bitter fight for his own soul, and only be saved at last by the hardest. It is no easy thing for the child of Adam's blemished seed to learn the lessons of faith in God, on which everything of salvation depends. The conditions under which he comes into the world are evil enough when father and mother have from their own youth kept themselves as holy vessels unto the Lord, lived honestly in all things, obedient to the teachings which he has given in his word (Lev. 21:16-24; Ezra 9:2; Neh. 9:2; Mal. 2:15; Ephesians 5; Col. 3:17; 1 Cor. 10:31), and so have preserved the life fountain from actual defilement in their own generation: but when to all the past is added a father tainted with narcotics, a family table spread with indigestible and exciting compounds, a mother who is almost cut in two with strings and belts, and whose every physical organ is crowded out of place; when the selfishness of Lot, the disobedience of his wife, the deception of Jacob, and the unchastity of David have been copied, without their repentance and instead of their virtues, then childhood becomes pitiful indeed. But thanks be to our God, it is not even then hopeless, since Christ lives.
Any guest who takes the family by surprise is at a disadvantage; how much more the coming child! He should never be a surprise nor a regret. He should be sent for,— personally invited to home and heart,—expected, prepared for as an honored guest. His earliest habitation should be guarded from anything that could mar the perfectness of the budding existence. Nothing should be permitted to crowd him out of his rightful elbow-room. Nothing tainted should touch the fountain of his life. The Spirit of God himself should be allowed to control all the conditions by which he is surrounded. A blight like mildew has fallen on many a child before birth because his was an unwilling mother; because the heart from which he was nourished was not pure enough to see God in her motherhood, and to think about her child, and how he came to be, God's own thoughts, by which both she and the child should have been sanctified, not shamed.
One of the devices of Satan for the ruin of the race has been to train the mind to think with shame of God's creative work in and through us; and one of the necessary reformations, if we would have peace in our homes, must be that by which we shall cease to feel, as well as to believe, that he has been obliged to employ degrading methods for the accomplishment of any of his purposes. “The commandment of the Lord is pure.” Ps. 19:8.
The wish that her child might never have been; that something might yet prevent him from becoming an actual care; that his pre-natal existence is not life, and so has not the claim of the living; that it would not be a very great crime to prevent it from becoming such,— any of these poisoned drops distilled from the mother's heart into that of the little one whom she is carrying under her own, will make all of after life bitter for both, unless, through true repentance and crucifixion (and that crucifixion will be as terrible for the human as was His for the divine), through the blood and cross of Christ, that bitterness is sweetened at last.
The cleansing of the temple, “which temple ye are,” is the first step toward a peaceful government in a houseful of children.~
(To be continued.)
ADVENT REVIEW AND SABBATH HERALD
Mar. 16, 1897 Vol. 74 No. 11
(Written from the Sanitarium in Battle Creek, MI)
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