Healthful Living

Inducing Causes of Immorality

Diet

927. If ever there was a time that the diet should be of the most simple kind, it is now. Meat should not be placed before our children. Its influence is to excite and strengthen the lower passions, and has a tendency to deaden the moral powers.... The less feverish the diet, the more easily can the passions be controlled.—Testimonies for the Church 2:352. HL 217.2

928. You place upon your tables butter, eggs, and meat, and your children partake of them. They are fed with the very things that will excite their animal passions, and then you come to meeting and ask God to bless and save your children.—Testimonies for the Church 2:362. HL 217.3

929. The very food they place before their children is such as to irritate the tender coats of the stomach. This excitement is communicated, through the nerves, to the brain, and the result is that the animal passions are aroused, and control the moral powers.—Testimonies for the Church 4:140. HL 217.4

930. By indulging in a wrong course of eating and drinking, thousands upon thousands are ruining their health, and not only is their health ruined, but their morals are corrupted, because diseased blood flows through their veins.—Unpublished Testimonies, August 30, 1896. HL 217.5

Idleness

931. To relieve the young from healthful labor is the worst possible course a parent can pursue. Their life is then aimless, the mind and hands unoccupied, the imagination active, and left free to indulge in thoughts that are not pure and healthful. In this condition they are inclined to indulge still more freely in that vice which is the foundation of all their complaints.... Some mothers with their own hands open the door and virtually invite the devil in, by permitting their children to remain in idleness.—A Solemn Appeal, 58. HL 218.1

Wicked Associates

932. Children who are experienced in this vice seem to be bewitched by the devil until they can impart their vile knowledge to others.—A Solemn Appeal, 54. HL 218.2

933. Neighbors may permit their children to come to your house, to spend the evening and the night with your children. Here is a trial, and a choice for you, to run the risk of offending your neighbors by sending their children to their own homes, or gratify them, and let them lodge with your children, and thus expose them to be instructed in that knowledge which would be a lifelong curse to them.—A Solemn Appeal, 56. HL 218.3

934. If you are situated so that their intercourse with young associates cannot always be overruled as you would wish to have it, then let them visit your children in your presence, and in no case allow these associates to lodge in the same bed, or even in the same room. It will be far easier to prevent an evil than to cure it afterward.—A Solemn Appeal, 58. HL 218.4