early, he will
very likely sit in the house all day and read good books about 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, three-score 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 elbow-room reaching to the horizon. Doctors
are constantly noticing how it is tied up and darkened by inferior
organization, by disease, and all sorts