Chapter VI - Marriage
319:1
her ancestors. What hope of happiness, or noble am-
her ancestors. What hope of happiness, or noble am-
bition hovers around the child inheriting propensities
that must be overcome, or reduce him to a loathsome
wreck. For propagating the human species, is there
not greater responsibility than for your garden culture,
or the stock of your flocks and herds? Nothing should
be transmitted to offspring unworthy to perpetuate.
The formation and education of even mortal mind,
must improve before the millennium. The most im-
portant education of the infant is to keep it mentally
free from impurity, and let mind develop the body har-
moniously; mind, and not matter, should govern the
physical. For parents to create a desire in their child
for incessant amusement, always to have some demand
on hand to be fed, rocked, tossed, or talked to, and
afterwards complain of their child's fretfulness, or in
after years of its frivolity,– all of which they have oc-
casioned, is an error.
319:19
Yielding one's thoughts to contemplate physical wants
Yielding one's thoughts to contemplate physical wants
surely produces them. A single requirement beyond
what is necessary to meet the most modest needs of the
babe is hurtful. The condition of the stomach, bowels,
food, clothing, etc., is of no serious import to your
child. Your views regarding them will produce the
only result they can have on the health of your child.
The daily ablution of an infant is not more natural or
necessary than to take a fish out of water and cover it
with dirt, once a day, that it may thrive better in its
natural element. Cleanliness is next to godliness, but
washing should be only to keep the body clean, and
this can be done with less than daily scrubbing the
whole surface.
320:1
Giving drugs to infants, noticing every symptom of
Giving drugs to infants, noticing every symptom of
flatulency, or constantly directing your mind to them,
laden with beliefs of disease, laws of health, sickness,
and death, conveys your mental image to their bodies
and stamps it there, making it probable at any time to
be reproduced in the disease you fear. Your child can
have worms if you say so, or whatever fear the mind
holds, relative to that body; it is thus you lay the foun-
dation of disease and death, and educate your child into
discord and out of harmony. The entire education of
children should be only such as will form habits of
obedience to moral and spiritual law; there is no phys-
ical law to be consulted.
320:14
Taking less thought "what ye shall eat or what ye
Taking less thought "what ye shall eat or what ye
shall drink," will do much more than you are aware of
for the health of rising generations. Children should
be allowed to remain children in knowledge, and be-
come men and women through the understanding of their
spiritual being. We should not think for a moment a
law of matter outside of ourselves can harm our babe,
for it cannot. Intelligence outside of matter, that forms
the bud and blossom will regulate the body, even as it
clothes the lily, if we do not interfere by some belief.
The higher nature of man is not governed by the lower;
this would annul the order of Wisdom; the false views
we entertain of being, hide the eternal harmony and
produce the ills of which we complain. Because the
belief of intelligent matter is accepted, and the opposite
science of mind rejected, shall we submit it is true, or
that the so-called laws of sense are superior to laws of
Soul? You would never conclude a flannel is better to
ward off pulmonary disease than the Intelligence that