Advice to Future Fathers

As an historian with unusual interests, Google Books has become one of the great diversions in my life. It comes in genuine handy for my teaching, but I also enjoy just poking around for weird old texts that no one would possibly have any reason to pick up anymore.

Today, I thought I'd see what the subject of fatherhood might bring forth from the electronic archives; among the odds and ends, I turned up a collection of essays published by the National Purity Alliance, one of many organizations at the end of the 19th century that devoted all its time to the scolding of American men for their assorted "social impurities," including tobacco and alcohol, prostitution, and gambling. In the course of an overly-earnest and humorless essay about "the sacredness of fatherhood," Rev. A. H. Lewis offered this bit of advice to young men who did not yet have children in their midst:

The National Purity Congress, Its Papers, Addresses, Portraits an Illustrated Record of the Papers and Addresses of the First National Purity Congress, Held Under the Auspices of the American Purity Alliance, Baltimore, October 14, 15 and 16, 1895 By Aaron Macy Powell, American Purity Alliance, American Purity Alliance