Helen was silent a moment and then asked, “Don’t you think the law of heredity a very cruel law? It doesn’t seem fair that children should be punished for the sins of their parents.”
“God’s laws are never cruel, dear. They are always made for our good, and they will be for our good, if we use them rightly. Harry Severn fell yesterday from a scaffold and broke his leg because of the law of gravitation. You might say that was a cruel law, and that God was unkind to make such a law whereby we can be so seriously injured. But think for one moment what that law means in the universe. If it were not for this 75 mysterious force which we call gravitation, the whole creation would be in chaos. Nothing would stay in place, buildings could not be made, people would fly off the earth and go, no one knows whither. Why, all the suns, moons, and stars of the universe are held in place by gravitation. If we are ever hurt through the action of that law it is because we were not happily related to it, that is all. The law is good, and what we have to do is to learn to work with it.
“It is just so with this law of heredity. It is the law of transmission. It works right along and transmits good or evil. It is our part to relate ourselves to it so that it will transmit mostly good. When we come to think of it, we see that that is what it principally does. Health, and honesty, and virtue, all good traits, are so constantly transmitted that we do not think of their coming through heredity, just as we do not think of all order and stability coming through gravity; but when undesirable traits are inherited we complain of the law, just as we complain when we are hurt through the law of gravitation. But do you not see that it is the very fact that the law is sure, that it invariably transmits evil, is one guarantee of its surety in transmitting good? Indeed, the Bible tells us that good is transmitted in greater degree than evil. The third commandment gives us the law of heredity: ‘For I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquities of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth 76 generation of them that hate me and showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me and keep my commandments.’ That does not mean thousands of individuals, but, as the revised version gives it, ‘thousands of generations.’ So you see what encouragement this law gives us. The evil in us is to be transient, the good everlasting. Instead of being weighed down by our undesirable inheritances, we should be encouraged to overcome them and to cultivate our good ones.”
“Mamma, don’t you think the fathers have something to do as well as the mothers, in trying to give a better inheritance to the children?”
“I surely do, and that is where I think a girl needs to be especially wise in the choice of a husband. If a man has traits or habits that she would not want her children to have, she should remember that, through the law of heredity, that trait is one they will be very likely to inherit.
“Girls quite often think it does not matter if a young man smokes, or even if he drinks a little, but when we study heredity we see what a threat such habits are to the health and welfare of his children. I remember when John Orland was a handsome young man, he drank, sometimes to excess. Kittie Claiborne knew this, and her friends opposed her marrying him, but she thought she could reform him, and you know the result. Her husband is a confirmed drunkard, as is her youngest son. The oldest drinks, too, though not to such excess, and you know that Kitty Orland, such 77 a beautiful girl, has more than once been found under the influence of liquor. The second girl died of consumption, and the second son is weak-minded.”
“But, mamma, do you mean that this is all because Mr. Orland drinks?”
“The observation of scientific men as to the effects of alcohol through inheritance would lead us to think so. I find this little item in the paper. You may read it.”
Helen read—
“European scientists have recently given much attention to the physical degradation among children which they believe to be the result of intemperance on the part of the parents. A startling example was recently published in the London Daily News: