hose who have since childhood felt as
it were the hand of a Father upon their head? For themselves it is best
and kindest that so deep a loss could come home to their consciousness
in pain.

At all events, the assertion so early made in Scripture is confirmed in
all the experience of the race. Insanity, idiocy, scrofula, consumption,
are too often, though not always, the hereditary results of guilt. Sins
of the flesh are visited upon the bodily system. Sins of the temper,
such as pride, cynicism and frivolity, are felt in the mental structure
of the race. And the sins which offend directly against God, do they
bring no results with them? Ask of the investigators of the new science
of heredity and transmitted peculiarities, whether it stops short of the
highest and holiest parts of human nature. Or consider the ravages which
victory and consequent wealth have made, again and again, in the
character of whole nations.

There is no doctrine impugned in Scripture, which men have less prospect
of shaking off, even if they close their Bibles for ever, than this. If
it were not there, we should be perplexed at a want of conformity
between the ways of God in nature and what is asserted of Him in His
Book.

But it is either slander or blindness to represent this law, viewed in
its entirety, as other than benevolent. The transmission of the result
of evil is only a part of the vast law which has bound men together in
nations and families, as partners and members with each other. It is
clear that distinctive advantages cannot be bestowed upon the children
of the good, as such, unless the same advantages be withheld from the
evil race beside them. If the prizes of a university are won by
knowledge, the result is that ignorance is "visited," in the withholding
of them. And if, in the vaster university of life, health, affluence,
good repute and a clear intellect are the transmitted results of virtue,
then disease, poverty, neglect and incompetence become the dire bequest
of the unrighteous.

There is no choice, therefore, except either to carry out this law, or
else to bid every man in the world begin life, not as "the heir of all
the ages," but absolutely destitute of all that has been acquired by his
fellow-men.

Sometimes a hint is given us of what this would be. There is brought
occasionally into civilised communities, from the depths of forests, a
creature without language or decency or intellect, with low forehead and
br