During sickness or convalescence procreation is not only highly injurious to the individual, but at any period before the physical powers have fully regained their most perfect state of health the transmission of life is more than likely to result in the begetting of children who are to be afflicted with mental debility and physical infirmities which shall be so inwrought into the very fibre of their being as to continue through their entire life, utterly beyond the reach of all remedial agents.
We can conceive of no greater wrong that a parent could ignorantly or wilfully inflict upon his unborn offspring than to call them into being at a period when they cannot escape the inheritance of lifelong physical or mental infirmity.
Abstinence from the marital relation in some instances becomes almost absolutely imperative. In the intimate relations of married life the exercise of such self-restraint is not always easy, but it is nevertheless possible. There are well-authenticated instances in the lives of missionaries who have married and immediately gone to climates where conception during the period of acclimation would have resulted fatally who have maintained absolute continence for a period of months and years. We know of an instance where, because of a diseased condition known as vaginismus, the marital relation was attended with such discomfort and pain that for a few years it was only indulged at long intervals, and then totally abandoned, and strict continence maintained for a period of twenty years and more.
Nor is strict continence in married life without illustrations of those who have voluntarily chosen it. There are some married people in this country, more numerous than some suppose, who have adopted the idea of uniform continence, and who call the reproductive nature into exercise for the purpose of procreation only, and who assert that the maintenance of continence secures not only greater strength and better health, but greater happiness also.
CHAPTER VI.
MARITAL MODERATION.
The foundation of marriage and of home can only be built permanently upon the abiding nature of love. Like our own being, love has a twofold nature. Its spiritual part is immortal and unchangeable; its physical part is temporary in purpose and continuance, and is liable to perversion and debasement. The physical may even be permitted to overshadow, debase and quite obliterate the spiritual. In its natural unfolding and manifestation love is very much like the plant that is rooted in the earth while it flowers in the sunlight. The earth and the roots in their relation to each other are essential and even indispensable to the production of the flower, and the flower is alike indispensable to the perpetuity of the plant.
So love has its physical and its spiritual nature. Love is rooted in that unconscious law of our nature which God has enacted for the preservation and perpetuity of human life. "Nothing but a spurious delicacy or an ignorance of facts can prevent our full recognition that love looks to marriage, and marriage to offspring, as a natural sequence." While this is its objective purpose, it yet serves other high ends.