14. There are alike in outward and in human nature occult and subtle transmissions of qualities and properties, both in time and in space. Those in space are so familiar that they excite no wonder; those in time, though less liable to attract notice, are no more wonderful.
15. A city has a continuous life, a definite and permanent character, and an individual unity, so that its moral responsibility may long outlast the lives of those who first contracted a specific form of guilt.
16. The same is to be said of a family or a race; and, moreover, the punishment for inherited guilt may often have a curative, or even a preventive efficacy, so that children or posterity may refrain from guilt because the ancestral penalty falls upon them before they become guilty.
17. The immortality of the soul asserted, on the ground that God would not have deemed a race doomed to perish after a brief earthly life worth rewarding or punishing.
18. Punishments in a future state of being are out of sight, and are liable to be disbelieved. Therefore it is necessary, in order to deter men from guilt, that there should be visible punishments in this life.
19. The remedial efficacy of the penal consequences of parental or ancestral guilt reaffirmed, and illustrated by analogies in the treatment of disease.
20. God often punishes latent and potential vice, visible only to Omniscience.
21. If a child has no taint of a father’s vices, he remains unpunished. But moral qualities, equally with physical traits, often lapse in the first generation, and reappear in the second or third, and even later.
22. The story of Thespesius, who—apparently killed, but really in a trance, in consequence of a fall—went into the infernal regions, beheld the punishments there inflicted, and came back to the body and its life, converted from a profligate into a man of pre-eminent virtue and excellence.