nd 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 and Indians--and a good many of their
own race as a kind of self-conscious blood-clocks with very limited
power of self-determination. That's the tendency, I say, of a doctor's
experience. But the people to whom they address their statements of the
results of their observation belong to the thinking class of the highest
races, and they are conscious of a great deal of liberty of will. So in
the face of the fact that civilization with all it offers has proved a
dead failure with the aboriginal races of this country,--on the whole, I
say, a dead failure,--they talk as if they knew from their own will all
about that of a Digger Indian! We are more apt to go by observation of
the facts in the case. We are constantly seeing weaknes