of faith.

[Illustration]

* * * * *

THE IMPROVEMENT OF OFFSPRING.

Why Bring Into the World Idiots, Fools, Criminals and Lunatics?

1. THE RIGHT WAY.--When mankind will properly love AND marry and then
rightly generate, carry, nurse and educate their children, will they
in deed and in truth carry out the holy and happy purpose of their
Creator. See those miserable and depraved scape-goats of humanity,
the demented simpletons, the half-crazy, unbalanced multitudes
which infest our earth, and fill our prisons with criminals and
our poor-houses with paupers. Oh! the boundless capabilities and
perfections of our God-like nature and, alas! its deformities! All
is the result of the ignorance or indifference of parents. As long as
children are the accidents of lust instead of the premeditated objects
of love, so long will the offspring deteriorate and the world be
cursed with deformities, monstrosities, unhumanities and cranks.

2. EACH AFTER ITS KIND.--"Like parents like children." "In their own
image beget" they them. In what other can they? "How can a corrupt
tree bring forth good fruit?" How can animal propensities in parents
generate other than depraved children, or moral purity beget beings
other than as holy by nature as those at whose hands they received
existence and constitution?

3. AS ARE THE PARENTS, physically, mentally and morally when they
stamp their own image and likeness upon progeny, so will be the
constitution of that progeny.

4. "JUST AS THE TWIG IS BENT THE TREE'S INCLINED."--Yet the bramble
cannot be bent to bear delicious peaches, nor the sycamore to bear
grain. Education is something, _but parentage_ is _everything_;
because it "_dyes in the wool_" and thereby exerts an influence on
character almost infinitely more powerful than all other conditions
put together.

5. HEALTHY AND BEAUTIFUL CHILDREN.--Thoughtless mortal! Before
you allow the first goings forth of love, learn what the parental
conditions in you mean, and you will confer a great boon upon the
prospective bone of your bone, and flesh of your flesh! If it is in
your power to be the parent of beautiful, healthy, moral and talented
children instead of diseased and depraved, is it not your imperious
duty then, to impart to them that physical power, moral perfection,
and intellectual capability, which shall ennoble their lives and make
them good people and good citizens?

6. PAUSE AND TREMBLE.