It is our business, I
repeat, to conceive of parenthood as the most responsible and sacred
thing in life. True, it now follows, according to physiological law,
upon the satisfaction of certain tendencies of our nature, which in
themselves may be gratified, and even worthily gratified, without
reference to anything but the present; yet these tendencies, commonly
reviled and regarded with contempt--at least overt contempt--exist, like
most of our attributes, for the life of the world to come. And that in
which they may result, the bringing of new human life into the world, is
the most tremendous, as it is the most mysterious, of our possibilities.
The laws of life are such that at any given moment the entire future is
absolutely at the mercy of the present. The laws of life, indeed; one
might have said the law of universal causation. But so it is. There is
no conceivable limit to our responsibility. We act for the moment, we
act for self; but there will be no end to the consequences. When the
stuff of which our bodies are made has passed through a thousand cycles,
the consequences of our brief moments will still be felt. This
dependence of the future upon the present in the world of life is an
almost unrealizable thing. Life could not have persisted upon such
conditions had not Nature from the first, and increasingly up to our own
day (for it is the human infant that is the most helpless, and the
longest helpless), had not Nature, I say, persistently constructed the
individual, in all his or her attributes, as a being whose warrant and
purpose lay yet beyond.
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