ited on them, are NOT incorrigible. Suppose they are like the wise
son of whom Ezekiel speaks, in the 14th verse, who seeth all his father's
sins, and considereth, and doeth not such like--then has not God been
merciful and kind to him in visiting his father's sins on him? He has.
God is justified therein. His eternal laws of natural retribution,
severe as they are, have worked in love and in mercy, if they have taught
the young man the ruinousness, the deadliness of sin. Have the father's
sins made the son poor? Then he learns not to make his children poor by
his sin. Have his father's sins made him unhealthy? Then he learns not
to injure his children's health. Have his father's sins kept him
ignorant, or in anywise hindered his rise in life? Then he learns the
value of a good education, and, perhaps, stints himself to give his
children advantages which he had not himself--and, as sure as he does so,
the family begins to rise again after its fall. This is no fancy, it is
fact. You may see it. I have seen it, thank God. How some of the
purest and noblest women, some of the ablest and most right-minded men,
will spring from families, will be reared in households, where everything
was against them--where there was everything to make them profligate,
false, reckless, in a word--bad--except the grace of God, which was
trying to make them good, and succeeded in making them good; and how,
though they have felt the punishment of their parents' sins upon them in
many ways during their whole life, yet that has been to them not a mere
punishment, but a chastisement, a purifying medicine, a cross to be
borne, which only stirred them up to greater watchfulness against sin, to
greater earnestness in educating their children, to greater activity and
energy in doing right, and giving their children the advantages which
they had not themselves. And so were fulfilled in them two laws of God.
The one which Ezekiel lays down--that the bad man's son who executes
God's judgments and walks in God's statutes shall not die for the
iniquity of his father, but surely live; and the other law which Moses
lays down--that God shews mercy unto thousands of generations, as I
believe it means--that is, to son after father, and son after father
again, without end--as long as they love Him and keep His commandments.

I do not, therefore, see that there is any real contradiction between
what Moses says in the