“The personal causes of this mischief are fear of pain (_i. e._
failure to see in pain the discipline of God which elevates
human nature), hatred of duty, shirking of responsibility, love
of pleasure, the substitution of hedonism for the religion of
Jesus Christ the Lord, and ignorance of the Holy Spirit as Lord
of _all_ life. How far religious teachers are accountable for
this we leave to their own consciences to say. The same causes
are at work in the high mortality of infants. The honour of
doing her best for her child is cast aside by many a mother
because it involves a certain amount of self-restraint and some
seclusion from the gaieties of the hour; and recourse is had to
all sorts of patent nostrums and infants’ ‘food’ (often the
cause of rickets) until the hospitals are over full of young
children, whose sufferings are the result (God grant that they
may be the atonement also) of their mothers’ negligences and
ignorances. Where there is not deliberate and wilful avoidance
of maternal duty, there is neglect through awful ignorance.”