xtend 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.

This matter is not often understood by the community generally;
especially by the young. I might tell them of the diseased eyesight;
the ulcerated--perhaps deformed--nose and ears, and neck; the
discoloration, decay, and loss of teeth; the destruction of the palate,
and the fearful inroads of disease on many other soft parts of the
body; besides the softening and ulceration and decay and eventual
destruction of the bones; and to crown all, the awfully offensive
breath and perspiration; and I might entreat th