tiate a son's responsibility from that
of his father.

We make bold guesses and confident affirmations as to the comparative
influence of heredity and environment. We enter into learned
disputations as to the blessing or the bane of an education such as his.
But every such case is still a profound and insoluble mystery. The most
comprehensive laws and the most careful generalizations meet with too
many exceptions to enable us to form a science. The children of the good
are too often bad and the children of the bad too often good to permit
us to dogmatize about heredity. We learn as our experience deepens and
our horizon widens to regard such collapses with a compassionate
sympathy and a humbled consciousness of our own unfitness to judge and
condemn. Whether we create our individuality or only bring it to
light--is the question that makes us stumble! But while we move in the
midst of uncertainties in this realm, there is another in which we walk
in the glare of noonday. We know beyond the peradventure of a doubt
that whatever may be the origin of such weakness as that of the young
mystic, the results are always inevitable! Nature never asks any
questions nor makes any allowances. To her mind, sin is sin! Whatsoever
a man sows--that shall he also reap. Whether he yield to evil
voluntarily or be driven into it by resistless force; whether he sin
because of a self-originating propensity or because his father sinned
before him, is all one to those resistless executors of Nature's law,
sickness, sorrow, disaster, death!

No man ever defeated Nature! No man ever will! From the instant when he
turned his back upon his home, David's fate was sealed. He was playing
against a certainty and he knew it. But he ought to have remembered it!
It was of this that he ought to have been thinking, and not of the
gypsy's eyes!

Sometimes such men escape from the final catastrophe of the long series;
but not from the intermediate lashings!

This brutal, idiotic step of Corson's looks like a final plunge; a fatal
fall; a hopeless retrogression. But we must not judge prematurely. "Man
advances; but in spiral lines," said Goethe. The river goes forward, in
spite of its eddies. You can complete a geometric circle from a minute
portion of its curve; but not a human cycle. We can not predict the
final issue of a human life until the last sigh is drawn.

CHAPTER XI.

THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL

"To tell men they cannot help themsel