Our Babies

Mount Ida Chronicle, Volume XLV, Issue XLV, 26 October 1917, Page 4

Our Babies

(By Hygeia)

Published under the auspices of ti*e Society for the Health of Women and Children.

"It it wiser to put up a fence at the top of a precipice than to maintain ■■ ambulance at*the bottom."

A "Baby-Bunday" Service.

At the City Temple, London, on July 1, 1917, a beautiful sermon, in connection with the English Baty Week Campaign, was delivered by the Rev. Joseph Fort Newton, D.Litt, the eloquent American preacher, recently appointed aa successor to the Rev. R. J. Campbell. From this sermon the following extracts are made. Dr Newton took aa his text, "What Manner of Child Shall This be?" (Lake i, 66). The Cradle of the Future.

The sorrows of the world-war are unutterable, its losses incalculable, it 3 tragedy unspeakable. "It is the future dies!" moaned a poet as he looked out over the wide-stretching desolation.

But it is not all loss, not all ruin, not all destruction. The nations are finding, not losing, their souls. Wider sympathies are growing up, drawing together peoples who have long lived aloof, and wise plans are being laid for a closer unity. . . Oddly enough, dark as the times are, everywhere one is aware of a strange new hope and the promise of a better day. We see no<v that many evils which we were half inclined to regard as inevitable may be overcome, or mitigated, by foresight an'l skill. Of course, the war did now create this attitude, but it has deepened it, just as it has heightened what we may call a aense of public-mindedness in us all—showing us that we are bound together, and that selfishness and stupidity are two words for thß same thing. Also, it has brought a colleciive detarminatijn to throw off our sloth of mind and body, our weakness of purpose and will, and do the things that need to be done for the common good. Men may differ in th*ir views of Divine providence, but they seem nuw to agree that there is such a tning as Human providence, which must be sagacious. forward-looking, laying plana not only for the living but for those yet unlorn.

in Behalf of the Baby. Such is the newer feeling and ih deeper insight back of the manyfronted campaign beginning to-da> on behalf of tne baby, who is th# fountain of life, the fresh spring whence flows the streams that brighten and sweeten tbe world.

Tbe hope of tho home, of the Church, of the State, of social beauty, national worth, aid human welfare is bound up in tht child, who i 9 the cus«o-.iian of whatever of truth or beauty we are tob?que:th to f e race. At last w* must *ntru=; into >is hand? all thii wei.axe ..r aned, all tb.t *e ;,uv« laboured to achieve. In »:im w* live as win, and he w,u takes care that his child is nobly and sweetly bam doe? much to brtr'p the kingdom -f heaven near.r to the earth—more, indeed, than many sermons.

No wonder Emer.on, as II Imes sai;i of him, went about peeping into every cradle looking for a new Messiah. To-day in the craales of Engiand lie the sages, seers, and saints of tomorrow, its statesmen who will sway men with the r insight and eloquence, its prophets with sweet voices of comfort or command, its authentic singers of the old, immoral song. Science and Religion at One. Indai-d, it is a fact of science, as John Fiske pointed out, that it id to the prolongation of infancy in eur haman its helplessness anrt the tenderness which it evoked, that we owe the birt- arc] r-rowt;. of f ur finer faculties. It ere; ted the hom* and invested it with sanctity. It made marriage, permanent. It drew together toe group, the tribe, for purposes protective and economic. Indeed, the baby is the very root fact not only of the hom« and cf the State bat also of the t.-mple cf faith—as «ve 3ee in the Cult of the < hild, at the heart of every lofty and benign religion. One sees the same fact in tfre gaiety of the child Dionysius, in the pity of the infant Buddha, ani in the intffable baauty of One who fonnd His craole areorg the kindly beasts of Beth k rem. Tnus up,,,, the baby, inj* .6 ba is, r egu tm> pbysical, tee

social, the political, and the spiritual future of the race, and when we serve him and give him a chance we serve all the high interests of humanity. When we look at the baby in" this j large way —as Whitman did in bis i vision of "The Cradle Endlessly Rocking"—it is clear that infant welfare Bhould not be the monopoly of a few enthusiastic idealists, but a chief concern of every one of us. It is in this light, too, that the facts of infant mortality, as now brought out, are so ghastly. Dangerous to be a Baby. Actually, as a noble woman has pointed out, "it is more dangerous to be a baby in London than to be a soldier in Flanders"; and with such losses in the front line and in the back line it is time we woke up and looked about us. If in America we began to stir in our sleep a few hours eailifr it wsb nut more far-seeing than the people of England. Not that. It is because in a new country, as George Eliot said it is with & new friend, we can begin so many new things. The matter of housing, for example, is very difficult in a very old community ; but in a newer country, when* cities are still much may be done in s little whi'e. Al-si it took tbH greatest war of all time to wake some of us up to many thi'.gs which ought to have b*en obvious, but it nreans that we are awake at last.

'Set Thy House in Order."

Nor must we ever again nod until the economic conditions, to wrich this pitiful waste of precious child-life is n large part due, are altered ana at la.-t removed. Of course, such a thing be aone all at once ; but it must be one of our ultimate objectives in our war against ignorance, negligence and misery. "Set thy nouse in order, for th- u shalt die md not live," was the prophetic word to the King of Judab. If Hrzekiah had been a better housekeeper he might have averted the illness thut threatened him with early death. "Set thy house in order" is also a prophetic word to us, not because we are about to die, but because we wish those who come after us "to live, and to live well"—which is the reason given by Arißtotle why • State should exist. The matter of infant welfare is all a problem of good community housekeeping, and the advent of woman into a larger field, both political and social, ought to do much towards solving it. Not only ought to do so, but manifestly will do so, as haa b en shown in many ways in actua' practice. The Religion of the Body.

Meantime—and, tiuly, it ia a mean time while slowly digging down to remove the cause, we must do all within our power to mitigate the results. Science, so amazingly fertile in inventing engines of destruction, is no leas rich in its ministry of blessing. Hence this nation-wide effort on behalf of the spread of knowledge to mothers, fathers, and those who have little lives in their care. So many such deaths are preventable, so many are due to ignorance of the most rudimentary matters of hygiene, tnat it ought to be possible to do a great deal of good by such concerted and intelligent labour. That is why the City Temple devotes to-day to this cause, not only because it is a humane and patriotic campaign, but also because hiskpartof what we may call the religion of the body, in which the Master was so act.re —aloeit He did not civide life, as we are apt to do, into physical, moral, and spiritual, but revealed His real grsaluess in he uni.y and simplicity in which He he'd all the ideals and aims of life. By the 3nme token, if it is vitally important that the child should be ph sically fit, it is equally important that he be morally fit, and spiritually alive.