For the race is run by one and one and never by two and two.
Kipling.
"Do you remember the name of that man we knew," said Adam one day, "who wrote a book to prove the immortality of the body? He did prove that various people had lived well on to two hundred years. If we were sure of that, we might get the earth very fairly started."
Robin laughed. "We are not apparently growing any older," she said; "but we can hardly count on more than a hundred years each."
"There is one thing you haven't taken into consideration," said Adam. "Our children would be several thousand years ahead of the original children of the Garden; they would be further along than you and I in a good many ways."
"No," she said, "I haven't forgotten, but I do not know how much of a load they would bring with them into the world. We called it heredity, the Hindoos called it karma, and, though that is different, educators called it the recapitulation theory."
Adam shook his head. "I understand heredity," he said, "but karma and recapitulation are too much for me."
"Karma is our heritage from former existences," she answered, "that may have been lived here or elsewhere. It is the sum of our past, good and bad. It is based on a belief in reincarnation, and it is the law that whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap. It is justice untempered by mercy, and it is at variance with the doctrine of vicarious atonement, though one may believe it and worship Christ as the highest type of love the world has ever known. Naturally, it does not appeal to the people who are willing to let some one bear the cross for them, and yet I have wondered whether, if we were sure we should not gather figs from thistles, we should sow the thistles so freely. The recapitulation theory makes the child pass through the evolutionary stages of the nation or nations he represents. It has a kind of seven ages of man of its own, and brings him down through all phases,—the savage, the hunter, the explorer, the conqueror, the builder. I don't pretend fully to understand it. I heard one of its ablest exponents say once, 'The soul of the German nation is in the German boy.' Heredity curses or blesses, sometimes both. Before any of these theories prospective parents might well hesitate."
"Which do you believe?" asked Adam, curiously.
She reflected a moment. "A little of all three; not all of any of them; one would have to be a profound student to understand fully what their adherents claim for them. Heredity plays strange freaks now and then. It is easier to account for Abraham Lincoln by the second theory than by either of the others. His shiftless, untidy mother and commonplace father do not explain such a soul as his; nor was there any reversion in his childhood to the original savage instincts that make children dismember grasshoppers—rather the reverse. I like better to think that, like that other Deliverer, who was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, he came to do the will of his and our Father which art in heaven,—came gladly, freely, knowing the end from the beginning."
Adam sat up suddenly and looked at her with startled eyes. "Then you think—you mean—you don't believe—surely you don't believe we have anything to do with our coming here?"