Mammonism

“ Mammonisms, grown asinine, have to become human again, and rational; they have, on the whole, to cease to be Mammonisms, were it even on compulsion, and pressure of the hemp round their neck!—My friends of the Working Aristocracy, there are now a great many things which you also, in your extreme need, will have to consider. ”

“ In brief, that Midas-eared Mammonism, double-barrelled Dilettantism, and their thousand adjuncts and corollaries, are not the Law by which God Almighty has appointed this his Universe to go. ”

“ Is it conceivable to any rational human being, that a scar, or what not, on the mother's body can be dissolved in her blood, pass through the placenta into the child's circulation, and then gather itself together into a definite scar on the infant's arm?
There is just as much reason to expect the child to grow to resemble the cow on whose milk it is fed after birth, as to expect it to grow to resemble its mother, because of prenatal influence, as the term is customarily used, for once development has begun, the child draws nothing more than nourishment from its mother. ”

“ Ask it for a smile, for a stroke of the gentle hand, for a word of love. All the full-fed Mammon can give you is what your mother would have given you without the consequent loathing, with the light of her countenance upon it all, and the arm of her love around you.—And this is what God does sometimes, I think, with the Mammon-worshippers amongst the poor. He says to them, Take your Mammon, and see what he is worth. Ah, friends, the children of God can never be happy serving other than Him. The prodigal might fill his belly with riotous living or with the husks that the swine ate. ”

“ If they have no feeling for the fruit of their womb, if maternal sentiment is so callous in their breasts, let them know that such produced abortions are the constant cause of violent and, dangerous womb diseases, and frequently of early death; that they bring on mental weakness, and often insanity; that they are the most certain means to destroy domestic happiness which can be adopted. Better, far better, to bear a child every year for twenty years than to resort to such a wicked and injurious step ”

“ The association between breasts and womb is so obvious that it has not escaped many savage peoples, who are often, indeed, excellent observers. Among one primitive people at least the activity of the breast at impregnation seems to be clearly recognized. The Sinangolo of British New Guinea, says Seligmann (Journal of the Anthropological Institute, July-December, 1902, p. 298) believe that conception takes place in the breasts; on this account they hold that coitus should never take place before the child is weaned or he might imbibe semen with the milk. ”

“ A bibber himself, when the springs of the desert were mine?
And how is the ax, as I said, laid close to the root of the tree,
And my curses fulfilled of the Pharisees, if this must be?
And if, as they say, he is preaching the word that we make
Of the unrighteous mammon a friend for the day when we break
With the lords of the riches of truth, as he put it, for then
The unrighteous mammon shall take us, console us again:—
I have wasted the goods of my lord! ”

“ Threads are being spun back and forth between us which no hand may touch without withering, as it is written in the Bible. There is a secret, a sacred secret, and if I offended it I would feel as though I had strangled the unborn child in your womb; and not only the child in your womb, but all the unborn children in my own breast. There is in the life of each man a woman in whom his own mother becomes young again, and to whom he is bound by an unseen, indestructible, umbilical cord. ”

“ If the breasts continue to receive a sufficient quantity of blood, the secretion of milk goes on properly, but the womb is deprived of its necessary supply; the embryo, in consequence, languishes and dies, and, becoming an extraneous body, is thrown off, producing abortion; while, on the other hand, should the womb still obtain its due proportion of blood, the breasts are robbed of it, and the secretion of milk, if not altogether suppressed, is rendered either deficient in quantity or deteriorated in quality. ”

“ After the child is born, the physician cuts the cord, and in due time the after-birth is expelled through the same passage as was the child. The expulsion of the after-birth frees the mother of all the tissue derived from the growth of the ovum, for the intricate mechanism that served to nourish and protect the embryo was almost entirely developed from the ovum itself. It is a remarkable provision of Nature that very little of the mother's tissue is cast off at the end of pregnancy ”

“ Common sense, we have said, would lead us to the conclusion that the fœtus is from the very outset a living and distinct being. It is alike absurd to suppose identity of bodies and independence of life, or independence of bodies and identity of life; the mother and the child within her, in abstract existence, must be entirely identical from conception to birth, or entirely distinct. Allowing, then, as must be done, that the ovum does not originate in the uterus; that for a time, however slight, during its passage through the Fallopian tube, its connection with the mother is wholly broken ”

“ After one has traced the development of the human body in the uterus, and even faintly understood its growth and method of nourishment, it is impossible to believe that the mother’s thoughts or experiences could in any way deform or mark her child, or alter its sex. That the mother’s “reaching up,” for example, could slip the cord around the unborn baby’s neck is manifestly absurd, as well as the previously mentioned superstitions about the eight-month baby’s slender chances for survival. ”

“ A WRONG TO THE MOTHER AND CHILD.—Sometimes the mother is diseased; the outlet from the womb, as a result of laceration by a previous child-birth, is frequently enlarged, thus allowing conception to take place very readily, and hence she has children in rapid succession. Besides the wrong to the mother in having children in such rapid succession, it is a great injustice to the babe in the womb and the one at the breast that they should follow each other so quickly that one is conceived while the other is nursing. ”

“ When will mothers awake from their lethargy? It is high time that they did so! From the mother having "no nipple," the effects of tight lacing, many a home has been made childless, the babe not being able to procure its proper nourishment, and dying in consequence! It is a frightful state of things! But fashion, unfortunately, blinds the eyes and deafens the ears of its votaries!
6. BAD BREAST.—A gathered bosom, or "bad breast," as it is sometimes called, is more likely to occur after a first confinement and during the first month. ”

“ With ease you serve mammon every day and hour of your lives, and for God, you do not even ask yourselves the question whether you are serving Him or no. Yet some of you are at this very moment indignant that I call you servers of mammon. Those of you who know that God knows you are His servants, know also that I do not mean you; therefore, those who are indignant at being called the servants of mammon, are so because they are indeed such. ”

“ If we take up the medical books and the popular science, or rather pseudo-science, and the folk stories of a century ago we find overwhelming evidence for the belief in maternal impressions. More recent {462} literature has but few examples, and the more the details are studied the less is the evidence of any kind that the mother's mind influences her unborn child. There is really no more reason why a child should he marked within its mother's womb than that it should be marked while nursing at the breast if something should happen to the mother at that time. ”

“ We know, finally, that, as Féré and others have repeatedly demonstrated during recent years by experiments on chickens, etc., very subtle agents, even odors, may profoundly affect embryonic development and produce deformity. But how the mother's psychic disposition can, apart from heredity, affect specifically the physical conformation or even the psychic disposition of the child within her womb must remain for the present an insoluble mystery, even if we feel disposed to conclude that in some cases such action seems to be indicated. ”

“ The eager looks of those that would get money, the troubled looks of those who have lost it, worst of all the gloating looks of them that have it, these are sure signs of the service of mammon. If in the church thou sayest to the rich man, 'Sit here in a good place,' and to the poor man, 'Stand there,' thou art a mammon-server. ”

“ After its birth she feeds it from her breasts, before birth through its umbilical vessels, but she originally gives only the eight chromosomes as the father does, and the child's vital principle builds up the body from this foundation. The popular notion that the foetus in the womb is formed through some process of literal abstraction from the maternal tissues is no more true than that the infant is so built up while it is suckling ”

“ So do the profound tides of the hormones, centering around the new creature being made in the womb, transfigure the face and constitution of the child-bearing woman.
During pregnancy, in consequence, the integrity of every structure of the body is tested. A stern, relentless accountant goes over the cells, counts up their reserves, establishes a balance, credits and debits according to the demands of the growing parasite within them. Follow changes in the skin, the bones, the nervous system and the mind. ”

“ In one point of view, more especially, is the present diseased Ovum particularly interesting to me; for it exhibits the most distinct proof that what I call the cortex of the Ovum, and which others have, without direct evidence, considered as a membrane of the uterus, is, in good truth, a natural covering of the Ovum. It is this very natural covering of the Ovum which is liable, from disease, to become fleshy, opaque, vascular, and lastly coriaceous, thereby cutting short the supply, or accretion of substance to the fœtus, and thus destroying its life and producing abortion. ”

“ The woman’s system is no longer that of a mother alone; it has been recalled to its rôle as a wife. There may be conception or there may not—at any rate, the frequent occurrence of children only a year or thirteen months older than a brother or sister, shows how often conception does take place in such circumstances—and the consequence is that the suckling has to be removed from the breast, in order to become the experimental victim of every kind of abomination in the form of substitutes for mother’s milk. ”

“ Professor Hall presented to his class in Baltimore a negro, fifty-five years old, who had been the wet-nurse of all the children of his mistress.
Instances of powers of prolonged nursing in mothers are not uncommon. Indeed it is the habit among some nations to suckle children until they are three or four years of age, even though another pregnancy may intervene, so that immediately one child is succeeded at the breast by another. In those who have thus unnaturally excited the mammary glands, an irrepressible flow sometimes continues after the demand for it has ceased. ”

“ By the end of the third month, a definite enlargement of the mother’s body becomes visible, because not only the actual child within her has to be accounted for in the space among her organs, but all the accessory growth of the chamber which accommodates the child in the womb has to find its place, the womb growing rapidly and containing not only the child, but the large amount of fluid by which the child is surrounded, and in which it partly floats. ”

“ If anyone should attempt to forcibly extract a babe from the protecting womb of its mother, the outrage would result in death, because the babe has not yet arrived at a maturity sufficient to endure impacts of the Physical World. In the three septenary periods which follow birth, the invisible vehicles [pg 195] are still in the womb of mother nature. If we teach a child of tender years to memorize, or to think, or if we arouse its feelings and emotions, we are in fact opening the protecting womb of nature and the results are equally as disastrous in other respects as a forced premature birth. ”

“ Sunshine speedily succeeded the showers, however, for my proposal that they should accompany us was received with rapture; and, taking their dolls into their arms, they abandoned the perambulators to the care of mammy, who hobbled towards home with them. This bunion was mammy's choice grievance, and she doubtless suffered much from it; but it was an article of the family faith, that, when for any reason she was disinclined to take her walks abroad with the children, the bunion sympathized with this reluctance, and crippled her to an unusual extent. ”

“ The experience of ages has firmly established the fact that the fetus is expelled when ready to enter the world, or as we say, when it has become mature. But how does the fetus assert its maturity? There is the kernel of the matter; that is the real problem, a problem for the solution of which, happily, we possess better facilities than have heretofore existed. One solution that has been suggested assumes that the fetus loses ultimately its power to assimilate the nourishment provided through the mother's blood. ”

“ While threshing corn she felt violent pain like that of labor, and after an illness suffered a constant fetid discharge from the vagina for eleven years, fetal bones being discharged with occasional pain. This poor creature worked along for eleven years, at the end of which time she was forced to bed, and died of symptoms of purulent peritonitis. At the necropsy the uterus was found adherent to the anterior wall of the abdomen and containing remnants of a putrid fetus with its numerous bones. ”