as certainly as the features of the body. I knew the father, who, in habits of filthy debauch, had acquired disease, which descended to his children, and they were born with feeble, unsound frames, incapable of meeting the hardships of life, and suffering with every morning's sun. Why do you not pretend to have too high an opinion of your Creator to believe that diseases are visited to the third and fourth generation? Go and tell physicians that you do not believe them, when they assert that many diseases are hereditary, because you have a more exalted view of your Maker than to suppose he would make things thus. Poor, innocent child, groaning there on account of the father's licentious and detestable indulgences. You might speak very pathetically and very zealously, and at last not be either as wise, or as benevolent as the Creator, who has made things thus. But to go back again to moral disease, to that iniquity which does descend: when you know there are ten thousand cases all around you, where the son is more inclined to copy his father's vicious habits than to follow virtue; when you know that all who fall into evil practices, suffer for their character more or less; and this visiting of the iniquity upon the children, God has never altered since he said he would not; why be trying to be wise, and to look lofty, and to disbelieve that which you have seen every day of your life when you mingled with society?

The deist confessed that he had known idle fathers rear idle children, and that men dislike them for their worthlessness.

He confessed that he had known evil tempered, jealous, or envious parents have families that felt as they did, and were considered unlovely and hateful, in pro

portion to the amount of malignity which they had copied of their parents. He confessed that it did not excuse the criminal in any court of justice on earth, to say that the murder, or the adultery, or whatever the crime might be, was copied of father or mother, who had acted it out before them. Finally, he confessed that if a father had succeeded in training a son in vice and hateful crime, so that this blackness of soul and monstrous deformity caused the suffering of its possessor for fifty years in this life, and then brought him to perish on a gibbet, perhaps it might forbid his joy in the next existence. On the same principle that if I may not take many thousand pounds unfairly, I may not take a single penny; on this principle, if a certain amount of unloveliness acquired in a given way, may detract from the happiness, or cause the suffering of any one for half a century, it may do so much longer, for aught we know.

Now, reader, in the next chapter we have a certain application of this truth to make, which will prevent our misunderstanding each other when we look together on the Ruins of Empires.

CHAPTER LIII.

THE SUBJECT CONTINUED.

There was a man living on the shores of Lake Erie, who taught his children that adultery might offend God, but fornication was not amiss in any way.

This was

a false religion. His children believed it and suffered

for it. His sons looked with entire indifference upon the ruin of their sisters. They would bargain for the prostitution of any female relative, if money were to be realized by the traffic. All the family were brought down near the level of brutes by such false tenets, for other parts of character soon corresponded, and they suffered from their father's teaching, and that greatly, whether we think it proper or not, that they should have been left thus far under his influence.

Reader, the Bible shows that you can teach your children a false religion, and succeed equally well, if you try. We know this is true from observation, because not one in the whole nation or tribe to which the man mentioned belonged, ever failed, or found any difficulty in training his family to the sin he practised.

There was a man at the foot of an Asiatic mountain, who taught his children that God was sometimes pleased with the sacrifice of a child, nay, that often nothing short of this would answer. In process of time his daughter had a little son, whom she loved, but she strangled him. The mother suffered, and the child suffered. The iniquity belonging to the false tenets of this false religion descended, and was felt to the third and fourth generation. The Bible says that we may teach our families tenets equally iniquitous if we try. Observation teaches the same, because a hundred families living around this man taught as he did, and none failed to rear their children in their own likeness. The God of heaven says, reader, that if we teach our children thus, he will let it take its course; and we believe he will, for he has in every nation, since the world was made, visited the fathers' teaching in this way to distant genera. tions.

Application.-On reading Volney's Ruins, I discov. ered two main pillars supporting the whole superstructure. I shall present them for observation one after the other.

1st Pillar. The first great pillar which he shapes out is, that a man is born a Christian, or he is born a Mohamedan, or he is born a Pagan.

Now this is almost true: with some slight variation it is what the Bible taught several thousand years before the author of Ruins of Empires was born. I knew whilst I was reading, that if a child was born of Mohamedan parents, and these parents trained the child in religion, it would be a sincere follower of that prophet. I knew that the same was true of Paganism. I knew that a child born of Christian parents might be a sincere Christian, and was more ready to become such in proportion to his faithful training. But it is true that he is not as ready to become a sincere Christian as he is a sincere Pagan, or Mohamedan, because men prefer darkness to light; they have not that natural relish for Christianity which they have for false religions. Mr. Volney's plainest inference I did not see so clearly. The amount of his inference or deduction, seemed to be, that if any number of parents, at any time or place, might teach their families any amount of false religion, therefore there was no true religion. A large portion of his page was true. It was urging the same doctrine which Moses said Jehovah spoke aloud to the people from the top of Sinai, long ago. A small part of his text only seemed false. Some declare that the most dangerous falsehoods on earth are those presented in company with a large measure of truth. They say that poison by itself might be rejected, because of its bitter

taste, but if presented in a large quantity of pleasant and healthful food it may be taken. In this way a production having one part falsehood, and nine parts truth, or correct principle, is very captivating. The truth quiets apprehension, and the lie is the salt to an appetite for darkness rather than light. Even where we do not love truth, we look around for a portion of it to keep the conscience calm. In short, I found the French philosopher urging protractedly that which I had read, or heard read from the scriptures from infancy, (like fathers, like children.) I do not know what influence his work would have had on me if I had not from boyhood known this to be one of the Bible's principal doctrines, and one of God's prominent threatenings. I am inclined to believe (judging whilst observing others,) that this book would have drawn me after its author with great attraction. As it was, it informed me of nothing new, and it gave me no prop for my infidelity. I knew that if God existed, he must do right; that as sure as he existed he always had declined, or refused to interfere in any way, to prevent falsehood descending to the children of false teachers, and that this was what the Bible said he had declared he would do. I confessed to myself that I did not see any thing more strange in his saying he would do a thing, than in his actually doing it. I knew that, although sitting on a throne of Omnipotence, he did not interpose, and he did permit the lies of the fathers to visit the children to the third and fourth generation, and there would have been no more harm in his saying that he would thus act, than in acting it. Having always been familiar with the fact that I could teach my child a false creed and an evil practice, if I chose, I was not so well prepared to adopt