Daily Kennebec journal. [microfilm reel] (Augusta, Me.) 1870-1975, 1870-11-18
NO. 274

| III q pOSltlOu 10 COfuUdJ Tie cOIuluOu 1Cci-
ing, the fallacy of which we perceive ex-
lists in circles of gayety and enjoyment.
Men feel that they have a right, SO that
they violate no law of society, to any de-
gree of indulgence of their animal appe-
tites. ''Is not our body our own?" say
they. As it respects their neighbors, cer-
tainly. l own my body. You do not own
it. AS it respects the magistrate, it is my
body, not his. But as prospects the greater
than all, God, the apostle explicitly de-
clares that you are not your own. aa
"Have not right to myself3n says
the man. 1t is exactly that that you have
not a right to. Ye are bought with price.
Ye are the servants of God. The price
paid was coined blood. And God owns
you, and leases, as it were, the body to
you, under conditions; and you have no
right to it except under those conditions
fulfilled. '.May not eat what / please,
and drink what please, and have my
excessive indulgence, my riotous gluttony
as you are pleased to call it? Is anybody
concerned in it SO much as am and have
/ not right, if please. to take my hap
piness in that direction? Who shall re-
buke me ? 1t concerns me-" 1t does con-
Germ you; but it concerns you as creature
of Gods moral government. 1t does not
concern you as one isolated-out of rela-
ton. There is not man in human socie-
ty that is not interested in the welldoing
of every other man in society. So are we
put together, that one thread in a WOODEN
fabric might as we'll say to it's neighbor
thread will rot it is not your business
it is my look OUT" as for a man to say
that he has right to ipjure his own body.
For does not the rotting of one thread
cause hole to appear in the fabric? The
strength of the whole requires that each
thread shall be sound. And the family,
the city, and the State, demand that every
man shall maintain himself in the full
I proportions of his true manhood. And no
man can say, II am my own master, and
nobody has any business to dictate what
l shall do with myself"
Primarily, and above all, mans body
is Gods. God has laid an injunction on
you, and he holds you responsible for the
use of your body, because it is his temple
If any man detile it, him will God destroy.
! In a secondary and limited sense, every
man belongs, also to the society in which
he dwells; and every man is bound to be
an example in that society, for the sake
of the young; for the sake of those who
are near him. No man has right to over
tax himself, or undermine his health, by
sensuous indulgence. No man by eating
and drinking can defile the temple of God,
which is his body, without sin.'
1t is not needful that man should be
blasphemer. 1t is not needful that a man
should be profane Sabbath breaker. A
man may not be proud nor arrogant. A
man may not be treacherous A man may
simply be selfish, and give himself up to
indulgence of such nature as shall take
down the tone of his body, destroy its eff
ficiency, and prematurely undermine his
health, and by various dissipations blight
the whole life. And that of itself is a sin
of no measurable magnitude.
No man has right to the use OF him
self except according to the laws and con-
ditions of perfect health. You are under
Gods law in nature just as much as in
grace and the violation of a natural law
is a sin just as much as the violation of
moral law. Or in better terms, there is
no distinction between natural law and
moral law. All moral law is natural law
and all natural law is moral law. Itis the
one God, and it is the one administration,
and any violation of known law is vol
untary sin.
There is much ignorance yet respecting
the conditions under which men come in
to life. Some things we know, and more
we are learning every year, 1t is very
certain that in the transmission of qualities
from parents to children, the voluntary
signs of parents become permanent quail
ties in their children. think one OF the
most solemn considerations that can be
presented to man-to some men certain
ly-is this; that while they seem to them
selves to be using their appetites sinfully,
for their own mere enjoyment, they are
| in foot la Hafi for
nent ill health, and vices as well in their
children. Tendencies are transmitted;
and just as surely as the seed of wheat be-
come wheat again, so surely the sins of
the father may be transmitted to the child's
life, and become avice again. And while
it should teach us something of the cause
why multitudes come into life with blight
on their heads, it ought to be lesson to
those who are standing in the relation OF
parents, and propagate their qualities
from generation to generation, teaching
them that q man who violates his fealty to
his God, to the laws of health, and to the
proprieties of his own body, yea, and by
wrong thoughts and wrong imaginatipns,
as well as by organic LESSONS, is perpetu-
ating in his posterity his ailments. How
strange that men will sweat through sum-
mer and winter to lay up pelf for their
children, sparlng themselves no toll and
no exertion, if only they may leave them
"well off," and yet will not deny them
selves those indulgences which they will
inevitably transmit to their children quail
ties that will be their plague, their bane.
and it may be their damnation There is
many and many man that will not quench
his frey appetite for the emp though that
appetite win inevitably become a disease
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means to bequeath his fortune to his chill
dren, and will suffer for their sakes, that
they may have more of life's goods than
he had, and yet he will not withhold his
illicit passions, and will transmit to those
T children natures that will burn as if set on
fire of hell! And thus by dishonoring
their own bodies, they dishonor also the
bodies beforehand of their children. They
! give, as it were, not a temple, but a
squalid hut for their children to dwell in.
A light arises from this subject upon
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