domestic relations. And
how can we expect them to be so, more than seeing people? The fact is,
but very few persons in the community give any attention to the laws of
their organic nature, and the tendency to hereditary transmission of
infirmities. Very few consider that they owe more to society than to
their individual selves; that if we are to love our neighbor _as
ourself_, we must, of course, love _all_ our neighbors, collectively,
more than the single unit which each one calls I.

"I would that considerations of this kind had more weight with the
community generally. I would that the subject were more attended to, and
that the violation of the laws of our organic nature were less frequent
in our country. There is one great and crying evil in our system of
education; it is, that but part of man's nature is educated, and that
our colleges and schools doom young men for years to an uninterrupted
and severe exercise of the intellectual faculties, to the comparative
neglect of their moral, and still more of their physical nature. Nay,
not only do they _neglect_ their physical nature--they ABUSE it; they
sin against themselves and against God; and though they sin in
ignorance, they do not escape the penalties of His violated laws. Hence
you see them pale, and wan, and feeble; hence you find them
acknowledging, when too late, the effects of severe application. But do
they acknowledge it humbly and repentingly, as with a consciousness of
sin? No, they often do it with a secret exultation, with a lurking
feeling that you will say or think, 'Poor fellow, his mind is too much
for his body!' Nonsense! his mind is too weak; his knowledge too
limited; he is an imperfect man; he knows not his own nature. But if he
has no conscientiousness, no scruple about impairing his own health and
sowing the seeds of disease, he has less about entailing them upon
others. And a consumptive young man or woman--the son or daughter of
consumptive parents--hesitates not to spread the evil in society, and
entail puny faces, weakness, pain, and early death upon several
individuals, and punish their children for their own sins.

"Is this picture too high-colored? Alas! no. And if I showed you
satisfactorily that sin against the organic laws caused so great a
proportion of blindness, how much more readily will you grant that the
same sin gives to so many of our population the narrow chest, the hectic
flush, the hollow cough, which makes the _victim d