ew men in
every generation--have two or three hundred years given to us outright
the day we are born. Then we are given seventy more. Others of us have
two hundred years taken away from us the day we are born. Then we are
given seventy years to make them up in, and it is called life.

If we are to shut ourselves up with one law, either the law of
environment or the law of heredity, it is obvious that the best a
logical man could do, would be to be ashamed of a universe like this and
creep out of it as soon as he could. The great glory of a great book is,
that it will not let itself be limited to the law of environment in
dealing with a man. It deals directly with the man himself. It appeals
to the law of heredity. It reaches down into the infinite depth of his
life. If a man has started a life with parents he had better not have
(for all practical purposes), it furnishes him with better ones. It
picks and chooses in behalf of his life out of his very grandfathers,
for him. It not only supplies him with a new set of neighbours as often
as he wants them. It sees that he is born again every morning on the
wide earth and that he has a new set of parents to be born to. It is a
part of the infinite and irrepressible hopefulness of this mortal life
that each man of us who dwells on the earth is the child of an infinite
marriage. We are all equipped, even the poorest of us, from the day we
begin, with an infinite number of fathers and an infinite number of
mothers--no telling, as we travel down the years, which shall happen to
us next. If what we call heredity were a matter of a few months,--a
narrow, pitiful, two-parent affair,--if the fate of a human being could
be shut in with what one man and one woman, playing and working, eating
and drinking, under heaven, for a score of years or more, would be
likely to have to give him from out of their very selves, heredity would
certainly be a whimsical, unjust, undignified law to come into a world
by, to don an immortal soul with. A man who has had his life so
recklessly begun for him could hardly be blamed for being reckless with
it afterward. But it is not true that the principle of heredity in a
human life can be confined to a single accident in it. We are all
infinite, and our very accidents are infinite. In the very flesh and
bones of our bodies we are infinite--brought from the furthest reaches
of eternity and the utmost bounds of created life to be ourselves. If we
were to do