Mary Wood-Allen

“ This is why many people on the Heights of Maturity are anxious to light a beacon for those who are still in their “teens.” They would gladly help others to shun the by-paths where they have met disaster, for they have learned the very solemn truth that in youth one is determining what maturity shall be. The seeds sown in the sunny meadow of Childhood and in the broader fields of the Land of the Teens are harvested in the uplands of Maturity, and the harvest is always greater than the seed sown. ”

“ The heart of the true man must throb a quick response to the appeal made to him by the White Cross.
It means marital fidelity, it implies the sanctity of the home, it creates individual purity, and that insures social purity, it means a nobler manhood, a grander womanhood, a safer childhood.
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The appeal is made to you individually. Will you not become a White Cross knight? Will you not, even if you cannot join an organized society, become a standard-bearer of the White Cross, pledging yourself to its five obligations? ”

“ And even if you cannot trace in yourself a likeness to any family representative, you may still be assured that from some of them your traits have come to you. You have only to recall the complexity of your sources of inheritance and then remember how many words can be spelled from the twenty-six letters of the alphabet to see that you can hardly measure the peculiar forces of mind and body that may come to you though that power of transmission which we call heredity. ”

“ It is not our fault if we are born of a family in which consumption is an inheritance; and, on the other hand, we can claim no credit to ourselves if we have inherited strong bodies with healthful tendencies. It is our misfortune, and not our fault, if we are not quite perfectly poised by nature; it is our good fortune, not our foresight, if we have genius instead of mediocrity. ”

“ We find that the land has three divisions: the Domain of the Body, the Field of Intellect, and the Garden of the Heart,––the same divisions that exist in the Sunny Land of Childhood, and that we have been cultivating ever since we were born. These are the kingdoms which came to us with the gift of life. We recognize that the gifts which come to us at birth and death are of life for ourselves alone, and we have had no thought during our childish years except to develop our powers for our own advantage. ”

“ More than one young man has said to me: “I was never taught that my conduct and thought would impress themselves upon my children, but now that I see that such is the case, I am sure that I will hereafter be more careful of my life than I ever have been.” ”

“ After your life had begun you were still so small as not to be visible to the naked eye, and would have been lost had you come into the world. But a home had been prepared for you in your mother’s body, where day by day you grew and grew. ”

“ The song of the nightingale is a call to his mate, the chirp of cricket, the song of the thrush, the note of the grasshopper, every charming voice in wild nature are notes of love, and were it not for these, field and forest would be silent. ”

“ If it were not a fact that health, purity, integrity, intellect and virtue were being transmitted to a far greater extent than sin and vice, there would be little good in the world, but the transmission of these good qualities is so extended, so like the air and the sunshine and the water, a common thing, that we almost forget to recognize it. ”

“ There lived a poor girl, about a hundred years ago, who was uncared for by good people and wronged by evil ones, and to-day she is known as a ‘mother of criminals,’ and no one can tell where the mischief will end. You would feel very indignant if you knew that some one had done your mother an injury in her girlhood, and you would feel the same way should any one wrong your sisters. ”

“ Your eyes, hair, mouth, chin, your stature, figure, complexion, your talents, capabilities, tendencies, your likes and dislikes, your faults as well as your virtues are repetitions of those who preceded you in this living network of existence of which you form a part. If you are not like father or mother you may be like grandfather or great-grandmother. If you do not find yourself repeating the characteristics or personality of any one ancestor, you may find yourself a composite photograph of several. ”

“ But one day she met a young man who pleased her, and as they grew to know each other better they came to love each other so that they wished to leave home and friends and make their own home and live their united lives separate and apart from all the rest of the world. ”

“ The guide worthy of trust must not fail to point out these dangers; and the prudent youth will listen to the warning voice and walk in Wisdom’s ways, for “all her ways are pleasantness, and all her paths are peace.” ”

“ The New Crusade proposes to emphasize the positive side of life, and waging a peaceful war, aims to supplant Ignorance by Knowledge; to eradicate Vice by Virtue; to displace Disease by Health, and to dispel Darkness by Light. ”

“ I have said that we are not responsible for the dower of virtues or of vices which are ours by inheritance, but we are responsible for the inheritances of our children, and this is a most solemn thought. Do you not begin to see that we cannot value ourselves too highly if we have the right idea of what our real worth is? We can scarcely overestimate the results of our own deeds. ”

“ I must put these, my children, in such relation to each other that they will have love for each other; that they will be bound by ties so strong that nothing can break them; they must be created in such a way that they will also understand their relation to me and love me as their life-giver. ”

“ Up to this time you have been but a child, and all your physical forces have been occupied in keeping you alive and growing. But you are now to become a man, with powers that will unite you to the race; powers that will give you the ability to form a new link in the living chain that now ends with you. ”

“ But this is, in truth, what many parents do, and the children find it a sad, instead of an amusing fact.
On the other hand, if one has led a life of uprightness and morality, and has obeyed physical law, his children will inherit his physical vigor, and his moral stamina. It becomes of exceeding great importance that these facts should be known to the young, in order that they may endeavor to overcome their own weaknesses, and strengthen their own good qualities for the sake of future generations. ”

“ If your ancestors did not do the best for you, will you not profit by your knowledge of this fact and do the best for those who shall look back to you as their ancestor? Supposing that your parents in their youth had said: “I will take care of my health so that my children may be born with vigorous bodies; I will make good use of my intellect so that my children will inherit an added capacity for acquiring knowledge ”

“ Marriage is the union of one man and one woman under the sanction of the law. This is the closest and most sacred human relation. In this relation the spermatozoon of the man unites with the germ or ovum of the 17 woman and a new life is begun. When your parents knew that such a little life had begun in their home they felt a great and holy joy, and desired that every good might surround it in its development. You were the first to come into your father’s home. ”

“ We read of knights of old fighting for ‘fayre ladye,’ of heroes who died to save wives and children; 10 we cannot take up a book of poetry without realizing how love of men and women has been the inspiration of the poet in all ages. And this is not all that we owe to sex. In all organic life we find the same force at work. ”

“ You can change yourself by education so that the inheritance of your children may be quite changed. For example, if you know that you lack perseverance, you can, by constantly making a mighty effort to overcome this defect, compel yourself to persevere, and this would tend to give your children perseverance. So you see we need not despair because we have inherited faults from our ancestors, but we should determine all the more that we will not pass these defects on to later generations. ”

“ In the front rank comes the one hundred thousand men who shall fall into drunkard’s graves this year, and behind them the one hundred thousand men who are to fall next year. They come with sound of revelry and song, and close beside them press a crowd of weeping wives and mothers and little children, starved, crippled, and murdered, who are to be fellow victims with the drunkard. ”

“ The White Cross typifies the purifying of the life from the desire of mere sense pleasures. It means the noble manhood which claims for itself the privilege of chastity and the rewards of purity.
The White Cross army is composed of men and boys over fourteen years of age who unite to resist vice, to secure safety for the home and for society, to become all that becomes true manhood. In organized co-operation there is strength. ”

“ There are few, if any, tobacco users who are anxious that their boys should early begin the use of the weed. But they do not realize the fact that in their own use of it they may have diminished the vital force of these boys, transmitting a tendency to disease, or perhaps an appetite for the tobacco itself, and not only will the boys feel the effects, but the girls as well. As the thought of men is turned in this direction, proofs are accumulating of the evil results to the children of tobacco-using parents. ”

“ I presume not, and many who are older than you have no thoughts of sex but those which are low and vile. But when you consider how the same principle reaches through all nature, and upon it depends so much that is beautiful and charming you cannot believe that is in itself vile and unholy, can you? If we are to think God’s thoughts after him we must come to look upon sex as something to be thought of and spoken of only with reverence, never to be jested about or debased in any way. You begin to see that more is involved in the 11 coming into manhood than you had supposed. ”

“ You have seen the father-bird bringing food to the mother-bird as she sits upon her eggs and waits for the birdlings to come forth, and you have thought it a pretty sight to watch his tender care of her. ”

“ Hundreds of men are living the white life individually, but are not associated together in an effort to influence others. Such association would result in more rapidly spreading the idea of the responsibility of the individual, would create public opinion, would give moral support to those who might find their unaided strength inadequate to meet the temptations of the world, in short, would 41 furnish the conditions favorable to the highest ideals of social and individual life.
The White Cross Society aims to unite men in such an organized effort for the elevation of moral standards. ”

“ We must not be so interested in the inheritance of evil qualities as to forget the transmission of good. We read in Exodus, twentieth chapter, that the sins of the fathers are to be visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generations of them that hate the Lord, but mercy will be shown to thousands of generations of them that love Him and keep his commandments. ”

“ Sometimes when your faults and defects press upon you with tremendous force and you find it so very hard to overcome them, you may be tempted to lay the blame on your ancestry who gave you such a dower, who by their lives handicapped you in your life-struggle. ”

“ Kerr asserts that the effects of injury to the mind and body may not always show themselves in the drinker himself, yet it is doubtful if his children ever entirely escape the effects in one form or another. These effects may be manifest in insanity, or in a tendency to diseases of the stomach, liver, bowels, lungs, or other organs; or with a like love for alcoholic stimulants. Not only may the child be weak in body but also in intellect. It is the statement of a score of observant physicians that 33 the children of intemperate parents are apt to be feeble in body and weak in mind. ”

“ Several of the boys have met with me once a month to study concerning themselves, and I can see that they have grown to have a reverence for themselves and a deep regard for all womanhood. Carl was in 22 last evening, and said, ‘Dr. Barrett, I am so glad Miss Bell sent me with that note to you, for your talk to me that night has changed my whole life, I know. I feel so much cleaner all through, and have so much more respect for myself. And I think so differently of girls and women, and especially of my mother, and I realize as I never did before how important a thing it is to be almost a man.’ ”

“ Grant Allen that everything high and ennobling in our nature springs directly from the fact of sex. He claims that to it ‘we owe our love of color, of graceful forms, of melodious sound, of rhythmical motion, the evolution of music, of poetry, of romance, of painting, of sculpture, of decorative art, of dramatic entertainment. ”

“ A tendency to commit suicide seems to be a marked bequest of an inebriate parent to his children, and it is well to state that in the opinion of medical men who are dealing with all forms of inebriety, the evils resulting to the children may be transmitted by parents who have never been noted for drunkenness. Continual moderate drinking 34 keeps the body so constantly under the influence of alcohol that a crowd of nervous difficulties and disorders may be transmitted even more surely than from the parent who has occasional sprees with long intervals of sobriety between. ”

“ It would seem rather amusing to us if one should sit down and write his will and say: “I bequeath to my daughter Mary my yellow, blotched and pimpled complexion, resulting from my own bad habits of life. I bequeath to my son John, the effects of my habits of dissipation in my youth, with a like love for alcoholic liquors and tobacco. ”