Satires and Profanities

Excerpt: ... the narrow way, while many take the broad way that leadeth to destruction. In other words, the large majority of mankind, the large majority of even those who have the gospel preached to them must be damned. When a human soul is born into the world, the odds are at least ten to one that the Devil will get it. Can any pious member of the Church who has thought of this take the responsibility of becoming a parent? I thoroughly believe not. I am convinced that we have so many Christian parents only because this very conspicuous aspect of the case has not caught their view. If the parents could have any assurance that the piety of their offspring would be in proportion to their own, they would be justified in wedding in holiness. But alas! we all know that some of the most religious parents have had some of the most wicked children. Dearly beloved brethren and sisters pause and calculate that for every little saint you give to heaven, you beget and bear at least nine sinners who will eventually go to hell. The remedy proposed is plain and simple as a gospel precept: let no Christian have any child at all-a rule which, in the grandeur of its absoluteness makes the poor timid and tentative Malthusianism very ridiculous indeed. For this rule is drawn immediately from the New Testament and cannot but be perfect as its source. Let us think of a few of the advantages which would flow from its practice. The profane have sometimes sneered that Jesus and his disciples manifestly thought that the world would come to an end, the millennium be inaugurated, within a very few years from the public ministry of Jesus. Luckily the profane are always ignorant or shallow, or both. For, as the New Jerusalem is to come down while Christians are alive, and as Christians in the highest sense or Christians without offspring must have come to an end with the first generation, it is plain that the belief which has been sneered at was thoroughly well founded; and that it has...