Читать книгу The Care of Children - Sebastian Kneipp Kneipp - Страница 5

First Part. Brief Advice to Parents.

A. How Parents should take care of their own bodies.

If the father of a family desires to cultivate good and abundant fruit lie looks round for a piece of land on which to grow it, and having purchased the ground spares no pains to keep it in the best possible condition. Not only so, but he will take care to remove everything that is likely to hurt it.

If the Creator has ordained that the inhabitants of the Earth should issue from Wedlock, and that they should be brought up in the family circle and made capable of performing the duties of life which in due course will devolve upon them, then certainly a great deal depends upon the marriages, families and their supporters.

The general opinion acquired by experience is that no one should undertake matrimony who is not perfectly healthy and sound and likely to produce a healthy posterity. To this belongs not only a good figure and proper physical development but a healthy mind as well.

They who will marry and be useful to mankind must be sound in mind and body.

It is not only the various illnesses of the body but the manifold diseases of the mind which may strike at and ruin posterity.

Mental infirmities are inherited exactly like physical ones, as for example avarice, envy, anger, want of chastity and want of moderation. If these are not corrected and controlled in the Parents they are unfortunately handed down to the children and what is worse the consequences and punishments are handed on also, even as the Holy Scriptures say "unto the third and fourth generation".

It does sometimes happen that the defects pass over a generation, but the more certainly will they appear in the second and the third. How good it would be if every man, beginning a career, would ask himself ''Am I fit for marriage? Will not the predominating passions in my nature embitter my professional and my married life? and shall I not in the end be the cause of a second and third generation being punished for my defects?"

I know a family in which the noble, moral, and religious character has been preserved for two I hundred years.

Of course one can, on the other hand, point to many families wherein debauchery or other predominant vice has brought misery and ruin to the descendants.

He, or she, who has a loathsome disease would certainly not be chosen in marriage because one has an aversion to the malady and dreads its consequences.

Should one then be indifferent to or have a less aversion to the pestilential diseases of the soul?

How beautifully the proverb expresses it. "The Apple does not fall far from the tree." "As the field so the produce." "Like Father like Son."

Therefore they who wish to found a family should first endeavor to make themselves sound in body, soul, and spirit.

We have in water a glorious remedy for making diseased bodies healthy; it can however, since mind and body are so intimately connected, operate on the former through the latter. It has in fact helped many who were well disposed towards it to make their healthy bodies a home for healthy minds.

Only they who are themselves sound in mind and body, head and heart can reckon on a healthy posterity; for, as from a sickly tree no good fruit can be expected so likewise from sickly, unhealthy or useless parents, no sound, healthy children can be hoped for.

A Mother who wants mentally and bodily healthy children must resemble in a double sense a fruitful field.

We will next speak of the bodily health.