n the building, and so many fancied as
well as real necessities have been at work, that it must be a conflict
of many natures."

"But where the house continues in the same family, the builders have
more or less transmitted their nature, as well as their house, to those
who come after them."

"Do you think then," said Arctura, almost with a shudder, "that I
inherit a nature like the house left me--that the house is an outside
to me--fits my very self as the shell fits the snail?"

"The relation of outer and inner is there, but there is given with it
an infinite power to modify. Everyone is born nearer to God than to any
ancestor, and it rests with him to cultivate either the godness or the
selfness in him, his original or his mere ancestral nature. The fight
between the natural and the spiritual man is the history of the world.
The man who sets his faults inherited, makes atonement for the sins of
those who went before him; he is baptized for the dead, not with water
but with fire."

"That seems to me strange doctrine," said Arctura, with tremulous
objection.

"If you do not like it, do not believe it. We inherit from our
ancestors vices no more than virtues, but tendencies to both. Vice in
my great-great-grandfather may in me be an impulse."

"How horrible!" cried Arctura.

"To say that we inherit sin from Adam, horrifies nobody: the source is
so far back from us, that we let the stream fill our cisterns unheeded;
but to say we inherit it from this or that nearer ancestor, causes the
fact to assume its definite and individual reality, and make a
correspondent impression."

"Then you allow that it is horrible to think oneself under the
influence of the vices of certain wicked people, through whom we come
where we are?"

"I would allow it, were it not that God is nearer to us than any vices,
even were they our own; he is between us and those vices. But in us
they are not vices--only possibilities, which become vices when they
are yielded to. Then there are at the same time all sorts of
counteracting and redeeming influences. It may be that wherein a
certain ancestor was most wicked, his wife was especially lovely. He
may have been cruel, and she tender as the hen that gathers her
chickens under her wing. The main danger is perhaps, of being caught in
some sudden gust of unsuspected impulse, and carried away of the one
tendency before the other has time to assert and the will to rouse
itself. But those who dou