The nursery is physical.  This involves the means of keeping the child in health, and the appliances of a vigorous physical development.  The Christian mother, to this end, should make herself acquainted with the physiology of the infant body.  Many well-meaning mothers, from sheer ignorance, destroy the health of their children; and it is on this account perhaps that four-tenths of them die under five years of age.  They should also consider the bearing of the body upon the mind and morals of their children.  How often do ignorant and indolent parents, by giving their children over to the care of sickly and immoral nurses, ruin forever the health and souls of their offspring.  Much, then, depends upon the physical nurture of your child.  If you would not injure its mind and soul, you must nurse its body with tender care and wisdom.  A vital bond unites them; they reciprocally influence each other, and hence what affects the one must have a corresponding influence upon the other.  Neglect the body of your child; destroy its health either by extreme and fastidious care, or by a brutal neglect, and you at the same time do lasting injury to its mind and morals; for the body as the vehicle of mind and spirit, is used for spiritual ends, and should, therefore, be nurtured with direct reference to these.

Your child, in the nursery, is like the tender plant.  The storm of passion and the chill of indifference and the oppression of parental tyranny should not be heard and felt there; for where the storm rages and coldness freezes and the hand of cruelty oppresses, we can have no beautiful and vigorous development of physical or moral powers.  There will be a stinted and one-sided growth.  At best it will be dwarfish, and tend to counteract the spontaneous outflow of mental and moral life.  The tender plant, when, cramped and clogged by existing impediments, cannot spring up into beauteous maturity.  Neither can your child, when crammed with sweetmeats, and oppressed and screwed into monstrous contortions by the cruel inquisition of fashion and fashionable garments.

In this way the misdirected love and cruel pride of mothers often destroy the health and beauty of their children.  They cause a sickly and dwarfish growth by too much confinement and mental taxation, by a too rigid choice of diet, by daily, uncalled for decoctions of medicine, and by fitting the body in a dress as the Chinese do their children’s feet in shoes; in a word, by making the entire nursery life too artificial, and substituting the laws of art for those of nature.  The result must be a delicate, artificial constitution, too fragile for the trials and duties of life.  The body of your child has not the blooming, blushing form of nature, but the cold marble cast of a statue; and it imprints itself upon the disposition, the spirit, the mental faculties.  It shows itself in peevishness, in imbecility, in such a passive, slavish subjection to the rules and interests of mere artificial life, as to admit no hope almost of spiritual progression.