out other little sharp-faced children just like
himself, who died early, having always been perfectly indifferent to all
the out-door amusements of the wicked little red-cheeked children.

"Some of the little folks we watch grow up to be young women, and
occasionally one of them gets nervous, what we call hysterical, and then
that girl will begin to play all sorts of pranks,--to lie and cheat,
perhaps, in the most unaccountable way, so that she might seem to a
minister a good example of total depravity. We don't see her in that
light. We give her iron and valerian, and get her on horseback, if we
can, and so expect to make her will come all right again. By and by we
are called in to see an old baby, threescore years and ten or more old.
We find this old baby has never got rid of that first year's teaching
which led him to fill his stomach with all he could pump into it, and
his hands with everything he could grab. People call him a miser. We
are sorry for him; but we can't help remembering his first year's
training, and the natural effect of money on the great majority of those
that have it. So while the ministers say he 'shall hardly enter into the
kingdom of heaven,' we like to remind them that 'with God all things are
possible.'

"Once more, we see all kinds of monomania and insanity. We learn from
them to recognize all sorts of queer tendencies in minds supposed to be
sane, so that we have nothing but compassion for a large class of persons
condemned as sinners by theologians, but considered by us as invalids.
We have constant reasons for noticing the transmission of qualities from
parents to offspring, and we find it hard to hold a child accountable in
any moral point of view for inherited bad temper or tendency to
drunkenness,--as hard as we should to blame him for inheriting gout or
asthma. I suppose we are more lenient with human nature than theologians
generally are. We know that the spirits of men and their views of the
present and the future go up and down with the barometer, and that a
permanent depression of one inch in the mercurial column would affect the
whole theology of Christendom.

"Ministers talk about the human will as if it stood on a high look-out,
with plenty of light, and elbowroom reaching to the horizon. Doctors are
constantly noticing how it is tied up and darkened by inferior
organization, by disease, and all sorts of crowding interferences, until
they get to look upon Hottentots