Inheriting Diseases

I AM frequently asked concerning inheriting disease. There is no such thing as inheriting disease. Nature has safeguards in every way possible through gestation and birth. Mothers may be abusing themselves in imprudent eating or overeating, overexercising, or allowing themselves to become irritable and emotional. The only way nature retaliates for being outraged during the pregnancy period is that the woman may lose the fruit of her womb; in other words, she will abort or miscarry. But stamping disease on a child in utero is against law and order. The placenta is the guard extraordinary at the portal of entry from mother to child. It is a filter and a neutralizer of everything that should not be carried through to the child's circulation. The powers that be safeguard the child, and the only thing it will inherit or does inherit is a tendency or predisposition to develop parental characteristics. However, there is no characteristic so strong in parents that it will be stamped on the child as an unavoidable development in its future life. Please notice I say not unavoidable under proper environments. The god of science builds perfectly when allowed to do so--under man's consciousness.

If we would have our mañanas come to us better and better, we must spend our todays in perfecting them. Tomorrow should not be the caprice of today's vagaries.

The father should do his part by being a man under all conditions, and particularly concerning his treatment of the mother. Selfishness and egomania are boomerangs that return self-made menaces.

It should be a very great relief to mothers, if they are branded by the profession as syphilitic or tuberculous, or with having any other so-called disease, to know that such disease need not be passed on to the child except as a predisposition to take on what diseases are peculiar to the family. When people become as intelligent as they should he when the profession begins to teach the people what their duty is in the care of themselves preparatory to child-bearing, and when parents will be governed by such knowledge we shall begin the evolution of a race of people that will be worth while.

Disease there is, both mental and physical; but it is not necessary. It comes from ignorance of the laws of our being. Man has the potentials for ideal self-building--for understanding himself; and when he comes into this knowledge, he will cultivate health, and cease building disease and stupidly hunt palliatives and cures.

Disease is willful ignorance, and cures are superstition when not knavish commercialism.

No, we do not inherit disease, except in the form of ignorance, superstition, and knavish commercialism--the kind that Jesus kicked out of the temple (Matt. 21:12).