Transmission of Qualities. 363 lectual and moral being; powers, elsewhere only found in feeblest resemblance, fill him with joy, or cast into depths of despair, as he stands apart and alone in peculiar responsibility. Conscious of duty and the need of self-sacrifice, he searches for the unseen and looks to the future; not merely floats or drifts on the stream of life, but controls weariness and dissatisfaction, as to the merely temporal, by a joyful belief in the Eternal. There are two worlds, and two lives-he belongs to both, whether he will or not; he must not, cannot sink to the brute. The science of life is evidently the highest of sciences. Obey no misdirection, make no failure. The purity of the pure is a ministering angel to every life. Dark shadows and fearful loss are the lot of some whose memory is a field of sepulture filled with carcases of evil and only evil continually. From the dust of their corruption evil spectres will come forth to walk hereafter. The lives of wicked men project horrible wretchedness into the present life, and fearfully shadow the future. Crime is developing a Cainite race. We recognise a law by which physical and moral taint cleaves to the children of evil-doers. The unclean thought of a polluted mind, like the disease of a pestilential body, extends its defilement to those who are yet unborn. The facts are of startling character. Few children of honest families take to theft; thieves, generally, are the descendants of thieves, hereditary paupers, vagabonds; a race with physiological and pathological distinctions; one-third are diseased in mind, or body, or in both. Examine the heads of convicts, whether in prison or in the haunt of thieves at large, they are of brutal type: foreheads low and narrow, features coarse, and skulls-not of the high Aryan shape. Their likeness to one another, their unlikeness to the honest and pure, are an awful explanation of the Second Commandment, and make known the fact-" Accumulated evil of generations has produced a low degenerate form of humanity." The clever-looking, bright, good-humoured thief? even this man is not only immoral—that is a matter of course; but often without the power of making moral distinctions. Take out those whom sudden and too great temptation has overcome, the perverted children of honest parents, the residuum is visibly brutish and bestial. The following details, copied from the New York Times, appeared in many papers :-"Six convicts, all near relatives, were confined in the prison of Ulster County. The circumstance excited the attention of the United States Commissioner of Education, and he took pains to trace back their genealogy to a single family of sisters, who had lived among the woods and fens, long ago, in that condition of squalid misery and crowded indecency in which too many young girls live in our courts and alleys. He went on to trace out the descendants of these sisters, following up the fortunes of rather more than half the entire race, and the results are given as follows:-One girl grew up, as hundreds of such children are growing up through the States, without known parents (in all probability she and her sisters were illegitimate children) without friends or education, or being reached by any religious influence. The vagrant girl grew up to a wicked womanhood, and died shortly after 1825, aged, it is believed, about sixtyfive years. The family line has been carefully searched, and 834 persons are distinctly traced, but it is believed that the full number of descendants is at least 1,200 from the three sisters. The number whose fortunes are most clearly known amounts to 709-327 males, and 319 females; remainder unknown." Mentioning only 569 of these, "106 were illegitimate, 164 prostitutes, 17 keepers of houses of ill fame, 142 receiving outdoor relief, 64 paupers in almshouses, 76 criminals. The number of indictable offences committed by them is 115; the number of years' imprisonment they have suffered, 116; the number of years' individual relief, 734. Of the whole 709, only 22 ever acquired any property; and of these, 8 lost what they had gained." In view of facts like these, it is time to cease questioning about things that profit not, and to work tenfold more for regeneration of those who are degenerate in body and in life. These degenerates are a spectacle to secularists, sensualists, positivists, atheists. The old doctrine of Original Sin is receiving awful physical and psychical proof. The evil done by a man lives in his children. Wicked thoughts, moral Connection between Moral and Material Good. 365 pollutions, selfish, godless minds, are open sepulchres. The connection between moral and material condition is known to be a reality. The marks of sin on hands and feet, prints of vice on the face, the broken and misshapen limbs of transgression, seams and scars of lies from the scourge of villainy, the crookedness of falsehood and imposture, deform and disfigure polluted men. We can imagine the spirit set free to traverse space, but a prey to those malignant powers which an evil life has made supreme. No merciless tyrant encloses his victim more helplessly and hopelessly, by chain and dungeon, than do retributive miseries. Fierce and mocking, they grapple with and bind the self-made slave; bear him, not from star to star, but from depth to depth of amazing woe. Turn from this depth of amazing woe, the miseries of vice and doom of iniquity. Our lives are bad enough and sad enough, they form but ugly pictures to hang upon the walls of consciousness; our real business is to adorn life with fairer scenes, to make our will right, and cause it to count for something in the world. We make it right by finding some supreme, some universal, some attainable good to strive for : "Work, without hope, draws nectar in a sieve; Hopefully striving, we shall not only rejoice in the possession of satisfying happiness, but attain the possibility of every virtue, and freedom to make our life a power. We shall not be free in the sense that our volitions originate without a cause; but free in the manner implied by our consciousness of responsibility; "voluntas libera tanto liberior quanto sanior, quanto divinæ voluntati subjectior;" the determination by motive not being casual but moral and rational; ourselves, by inner power, giving decisive preponderance to this or to that. These motives are the fruit of desires, aversions, habits, disposition, combined with outer circumstances calling incentives into action; hence, volition is a moral or immoral effect —an effect which we feel that we help to produce and are responsible for; an effect produced by that power or freedom to choose which constitutes the grandeur of our nature. On this account, we educate ourselves, are subject to discipline, exalt the desire of right conduct, awake hatred against all iniquity, that we may use our freedom in highest and purest manner. The difference between a bad and a good man is that the latter has an aversion to evil and desires right. Even Necessitarians possess a strong sense of right and wrong, and confess that good or evil ought to befall a man according to his conduct. We all admit that there is a difference, must be a difference. Whoever cultivates a disposition to wrong, places himself out of sympathy with his fellow-creatures, and they account it their duty to protect themselves as against a noxious beast. Even conceding that a man is corrupt by birth, and so ill bred that he is sold to do evil; he must be kept in fear of punishment, made to feel punishment, that his will may be governed by deterrent motives. Hence, the benefit of the offender and the protection of those whom he would offend justify punishment. We are not mere links in a chain of causation, nor mere grains in a mass of existence, nor is law an adamantine barrier. Receiving impressions from Nature and intelligently reacting upon Nature, we weave, according to the fundamental property of our organisation, that which is beneficial into our life, and shun the hurtful. We know what volition is, and the causation of it. We need not think of will as an entity in itself, which it is not, but as the result of organic, physical, psychical, mental changes, in the centre of our being. Freedom consciously aiding to form the strongest motive, having power to obey that motive. Out of this arises the universal opinion that men can voluntarily determine their own actions. Whatever a man's theories may be, he practically ignores and discredits the doctrine that volition is lawless. We are now "Upon the world's great altar stairs, That lead through darkness up to God;" can see how men may form or weaken, perfect or cause to perish, the faculty and function of God-consciousness in them. If we pray, endeavour to use and enlarge our consciousness of Reverse of the Old Parable. 367 God, we attain a sense of nearness to the Master Intellect-the Oversoul-the Father of our spirit. If we never pray, nor strive, consciousness of the Supreme, even if it have been formed in us, is weakened and may become altogether dead. The sanctification of our intellect as an altar to God, the presentation thereon of our thought and emotion in sacrifice, the going up of fervent desire from the heart, are generally necessary for the descent of heavenly fire to kindle our spirit. If a man will not endeavour to obtain this fire, but allows cold mental states to misrepresent-not present God, and idols of the market or flashes of sensuality to spread their glamour, there will be no sense of Divine presence in the garden of his thoughts, no striving, as of Jacob with the angel, no talking with the Lord in the cool of the day. We have been led by our investigation to the very boundary of our intellectual powers, and enter the region where most men fail; for it must be confessed that, though making endless advance in knowledge, we are almost at a standstill in moral goodness and spiritual-mindedness. We stand, since the days of Christ, as if again in Paradise, in presence of the Trees of Life and of Knowledge. Too many rehearse the old tragedy; whereas, the reverse of the parable of the trees should now be tried. It is not enough to possess great knowledge, that may lie outside the centre of our being. A licentious scoffer can be very intellectual, but he cannot, while a scoffer, be spiritual. He may have a consciousness of God, not much stronger than an exercise of ideality. His soul will be a sort of romance in life, so that he says "If you are content to make your soul a poetic rendering of a phenomenon which refuses the yoke of ordinary mechanical laws, I, for one, would not object to this exercise of ideality."1 Men who thus speak of the soul-the organ of God-consciousness, are in danger, through disuse, of so far losing the Divine gift as to become incapable of true worship. There are three natures in man—the fleshly, the intellectual, the moral; and there are three degrees of sin-sins of the flesh, sins of temper and intellect, sins of 1 Address, by President of the Midland Institute, at Birmingham. Reported in the Times, 2nd October, 1877. |