Children’s diseases are a logical result of children’s beatings ❦ To
shock, pain, grieve, anger or violently suppress a human being is to run
a grave risk of lowering that individual’s physical vitality to a point
where the person is an easy prey for any disease that happens along. That
which interferes with the vital functions, even in a transient way, is
not wise nor good. ¶ Extreme anger is apt to be followed by lassitude
or some marked physical disturbance. In fact, it is well known that
hate secretes a toxin which manifests itself in the breath, and in the
tissues ❦ What we call a disease is a symptom of vitality decreased
to a point where the forces of dissolution are active. A shock which
will blanch the cheek disturbs the circulation, and interferes with the
digestion. ¶ Perhaps the whipping did not mutilate, but it angered and
shocked until a fever followed. Dyspepsia is a matter of the nerves. Much
of our bad theology, if we could trace it, would be found to have its
rise in indigestion. And that it has caused pathological disturbances
of countless varieties, from catarrh to acute mania, is known to every
thinking physician. ¶ And of all causes of sickness, I know of none that
has borne a greater crop of cosmic cockleburs than the old-time plan of
whipping children. When Solomon put forth that unwise saying, “Spare
the rod and spoil the child,” an extent of harm was done the human race
that no pen can compute. That one statement should have convinced every
intelligent person that the Bible was just like every other book—good
and bad in spots. If accepted literally, the Bible is an atrocious
book, false, obscene and misleading, tending to insanity, disease and
death. Fortunately, we are now allowed to take the Bible as the garbled
literature of a barbaric and superstitious past, collected from many
sources, and good and bad, wise and silly, sublime and vicious—all as
the case may be. ¶ That millions of parents have bolstered their brutal
tendency to punish and inflict pain by that remark about sparing the
rod, every one knows. And always the tendency to beat the little thing,
too weak to strike back, was more to ease the feelings of the parent
than to improve and benefit the child. Moreover, it was educating the
child, for the youngster grew up and inflicted upon its own children all
the horror that it had, itself, endured. It was heir to the brutality,
heir to the Bible, heir to the strap, birch, rod, ferrule and hairbrush,
so these were in daily use in all Christian homes. ¶ In my childhood,
I remember a Baptist preacher who lived neighbor to us ❦ This man was
loud, lacrimose, brutal, a devout Christian, and a preacher of power,
snatching many souls from the burning. The way that gospel sharp used
to pass out his tidings of great joy broke in on my childish fancies,
so I became convinced that if God was really just, that pious, bawling
beast who fed fat on our chickens would go to hell, sure. But I kept
my suspicions to myself. This preacher had a strap cut from a side of
sole-leather—a strap three feet long, with tails, with which he used
to beat up one of his nine or ten children every day ❦ From the baby
wearing diapers to a big boy of sixteen, and a girl full-grown, they
all got it. I have heard their cries for mercy ring out on a winter’s
night when they would run out into the yard to escape their pious parent
intent on saving their souls. ¶ Once, one of his daughters, a girl of
fifteen, spent ten cents for a blue ribbon, and appeared in church with
the ribbon in her hair. Her father saw her from his place in the pulpit.
He noted her mark of pride ❦ He denounced her before the congregation,
and expressed a hypocritical, pious pain that his own flesh and blood
should be guilty of such devilish frivolity. Then he ordered her out of
the church. When he got home after the service, he fell upon her with the
strap. It pained him, but he felt it was his duty to correct her. The
mother was a sick and undone little creature, who twice had twins, and
bore at least one baby a year, except the year when her lord and master
crossed the plains and got alkalied. And this woman really believed, too,
that the children should be punished, and so she had a way of reporting
them, thus, “I’ll tell your father on you when he comes home!” She, too,
believed in Solomon, and she believed also in her husband’s religion.
Poor thing, she was too busy bearing babies to really think anything
out for herself ❦ But that Sunday afternoon, when her husband felt it
his duty to whip the daughter, the girl ran to the mother and demanded
protection. The good man was laying on the strap, anywhere, over the
girl’s head, shoulders, her arms and hands, although usually he picked
out some choice portion of anatomy and did an artistic job. ¶ Yet this
time the girl fought back, and she was only a slim slip of a thing. But
now, the womanhood in her was aroused. She felt insulted. She struck,
she bit, she scratched, she screamed. And then she ran to her mother ❦
Something in the little yellow mother was now aroused. Her child was
being abused. Well, what of it! Hadn’t she seen these whippings going on
daily for twenty years? But this was different ❦ The adolescent girl had
only given way to her innocent and natural desire to put forth a little
color and be beautiful. Now it was brute man against woman. The mother
seized the strap. It was jerked through her clenched hands with such
violence that it took the skin with it. The preacher had backed the girl
into a corner, and with one hand clutching her hair was laying on the
strap with the other, in the name of the Lord. The mother was behind.
Suddenly she seized a long-handled skillet that was on the kitchen-stove,
she swung it with both hands, and it landed square on the man’s head ❦
He was dazed, and turned half-around. Then he got another one. He was
getting a kitchen shower. One sharp edge of the skillet skinned one of
his ears and cut it half-off, as Peter touched up the servant of the
High Priest. The blood ran in a stream. The woman seeing the gore, and
amazed at her own temerity, fell in a dead swoon. The girl escaped and
ran over to our house. My father and mother hurried over, and, kid-like,
I followed. We found the preacher on his knees, praying over his wife,
begging God for her recovery ❦ He told us he had stumbled and fallen
against the cook-stove. My father took a stitch in the ecclesiastic
souse, and washed off the blood of the lamb ❦ The woman soon recovered
and was put to bed. The girl took care of herself. She told my mother
the truth of the incident, but was cautioned not to repeat it to others,
and she didn’t. ¶ The next Sunday the holy man preached as usual,
unctuous and oily, smiling and smirking, thundering ponderously betimes,
warning us to flee the wrath to come. ¶ This daughter died at eighteen,
of galloping consumption. One of the boys achieved considerable local
fame as a horse-thief. I believe he was the only one of that big family
who reached maturity, and this was because he had a pachyderm hide and
a heart of gneiss ❦ Several of the children died in babyhood, the rest
ran the gamut of about all the diseases in the books. And finally, the
Lord’s will was done. A long row of little white headstones in the
village graveyard marks where they sleep, freed from the strap, awaiting
a glorious resurrection at the Last Great Day. ¶ What killed them? The
strap, I should say, carried to its logical limit, with a plentiful lack
of love. Spare the rod and save the child, for love is life, and hate is
death. Love is better than a cat-o’-nine-tails, and Solomon, the wisest
man who ever lived, was a lobster—at least part of the time.
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