CHAPTER XLIV

HEREDITY AND REPRODUCTION

=Life is real.=--What is life? Many theories have been offered by the leading materialistic students of the past and present, but all have signally failed to tell us what life is in its ultimate essence. All attempts to discover life by aid of the scalpel, microscope and chemical analysis have likewise failed. This class of scientists has made several attempts to explain life as being the phenomena of matter undergoing certain peculiar chemical changes, or due to molecular motion. They have failed to recognize two great realms of existence, the material and the immaterial, the visible and the invisible, the tangible and the intangible. Life, physical, mental and spiritual, though invisible and immaterial, is none the less real in its essence.

The materialists have tried hard to explain reproduction and heredity on a physical basis. By this method they have failed to explain many of the most common facts.

=The germ cell.=--The difference between the germ cells of the lower animals and man is not in their structure, or their chemical elements, but in their inherent life. Here are three germ cells. As fast as the scientist is capable of analyzing them they may be absolutely identical in their physical anatomy, yet one may contain the life of a rabbit, another the life of a dog, and still another the soul of a man. The physical anatomy does not determine whether the offspring is to be a rabbit, a dog, or a human being. It is the resident life that determines this. Physical organs are the mediums through which life reproduces itself. The heredity of the offspring is determined by the many influences brought to bear upon it before birth and upon the lives of the ancestors.

=Masculine and feminine principal.=--The organic world is pregnant with two primary and vital principles, the masculine and the feminine. Every plant, lower animal, and man is reproduced by the union of these principles. In the lower forms of plant and animal life these two principles reside in the same organism. Reproduction takes place within the parent organism by the union of these two natures. The parent organism divides and becomes two distinct organisms. This is reproduction by division.

=Reproduction in the lower forms of life.=--In the next higher forms of plant and animal life these two principles reside in the same individuals, but in separate organs. These organs possessing the female nature produce seeds or eggs. The organs possessing the male nature produce a fertilizing substance called pollen or semen. Reproduction takes place by the fusion of the male and female cells.

In the higher animals and man these principles reside in separate individuals. In some mysterious way the procreative cells have residing within themselves, in rudimentary form, all the attributes of the parents.

=Sex is in the life principle.=--Once sex was considered a part of the physical organism. Now we are beginning to see that sex is vitally and substantially related to life. When a little plant comes into the world it is because the masculine and feminine sex principles have united on the plane of physical life. Like begets like. The baby plant did not possess animal life, intellectual life, or moral life for the reason that the parent plant could not transmit a form of life it did not possess in its masculine and feminine nature.

When the little animal comes into this world it is because the masculine and feminine principles have united on the plane of instinctive animal life and, among the higher classes of animals, rudimentary mental life.

=Reproduction man.=--Man is organized on higher planes than the rest of the organic world. Man possesses not only the highest form of physical life, but also mental and spiritual life. Sex in man is primarily and substantially related to his physical, mental and spiritual life. The sperm cell of the father is formed from his blood and possesses the essence of his three-fold nature. The germ cell of the mother is formed from her blood and possesses the essence of her three-fold nature. When these two cells, masculine and feminine, unite under proper conditions, a human being having a physical, mental and moral nature, is started upon its endless voyage, nine months before it makes its visible appearance in the world. When God made the body of primitive man He “breathed into him the breath of life (Hebrew lives) and man became a living soul,” having power of self-propagation and the power to transmit potential procreative power from one generation to another.

=Man’s relation to the past.=--Each new being at the initial of life is the sum total of all the influences, good and bad, of his ancestry back to Adam. The child is largely the product of his parents. He is not a duplicate of either, but the product of their blended personalities, being influenced much by his grand-parents, less and less as his ancestry becomes more and more remote. During embryonic and fetal development the child will tend to unfold in all departments of its nature according to the pattern received from its ancestors, but this may be more or less influenced by maternal impressions. After birth the child has two agents that will ever be active, heredity and environment. These two agents at their best are never perfect. Hence the child will ever need a third agent, the grace of God.

=Why children in the same home differ.=--Here is a family of five children. They differ from each other quite as much as if they represented five families. Now, if heredity does not explain this difference, then the children, having the same environment, would be alike. The children in the same home differ from each other for the reason that the parents, at the creative moment, did not sustain to each child the same combination of physical, mental and moral relations. At the creative moment of the second child the parents were not in the same physical, mental and moral states they were at the creative moment of the first. They had each changed in their physical states of health, their mental interests and in their moral and religious convictions and experiences. For the same reason each child differs from all the others in the family. Though they had the same environments, no two were alike. So great is the influence of heredity that no two people can be made alike by giving to them the same environment.

=Twins.=--If two persons could receive the same heredity and environment, they would be exactly alike. The nearest approach we have to this is in the case of twins. Nearly one-half of twins are so much alike

that it is difficult to tell them apart. Other twins resemble each other more than children in the same home born months apart.

=Why some are alike and others are not.=--If the creative moment of twins were the same, or nearly the same, the parents sustained to each the same combination of influences. If their creative moments occurred hours or even days apart, then there was time for one or both parents to sustain a different relation to one, from that they sustained to the other. This accounts for the difference between some twins. Not only do twins resemble each other physically, but often their mental and moral tastes and tendencies are very much alike.

=Twin brothers.=--I once met twin brothers sixty-seven years old. They had been lost to each other for fourteen years. They still resembled each other, dressed alike, wore their beards and hair alike, talked and laughed alike. Sixty-seven years had not greatly modified their physical and mental resemblance. Twin children usually inherit similar perfections or imperfections. This I have noticed for a number of years. Where I am now writing is a club-footed, rheumatic boy. His twin brother is feeble-minded. In an adjoining state a few days ago I studied a young man who was helpless from his arms down. His twin sister was helpless at birth and died in childhood. These examples indicate that the before-birth influences being the same, were the causes of these defects in the offspring.

=An objection answered.=--A man said to me, “I don’t believe in heredity.” I asked him why he did not. He replied, “I know of a drunken father who had four sons; two were dissipated from their youth and two were ‘teetotalers.’ If the father had had anything to do with this, all would have been drunkards.”

My reply was, “The father through the laws of heredity may have transmitted to two of his boys tendencies toward drunkenness and to the other two, tendencies toward sobriety. In the case of the first two, the father might have, in his mental and moral natures, favored intemperance, longed for alcohol, or been on a drunken debauch at the initial of their lives. With reference to the last two, the father might have temporarily reformed, mentally and morally, he might have been strongly opposed to the use of strong drink at the initial of their lives.

“Again the mother might have had very light convictions on temperance prior to the birth of the first two and very strong mental and moral opposition prior to the birth of the last two. Again something in the form of environment may have led the last two to overcome their inherited tendencies toward drink.”

=Materialistic theory fails.=--Materialistic philosophers admit that heredity tends to reproduce the likeness of the parents in the child. They try to explain this on a purely physical basis. Prof. Huxley, Mr. Spencer and the more modern Weismann, while they have each coined some new technical terms with which to convey their materialistic ideas, suppose that each procreative cell, masculine and feminine, contains a representative material something from every atom of the respective body from which it was formed. In this way the child has a body with marked resemblance to its parents. Since, according to their theory, all mental and moral phenomena are due to chemical changes and molecular disturbances in the brain, and since the child inherited a brain like its parents, the molecular movements of the child’s brain will be like the molecular movements in the brains of its parents; hence it will have inherited the mental and moral characteristics of the father and mother.

=Life is a unit.=--It takes only a few days for the procreative cells to be elaborated and matured. Here is a child. The initial of its life occurred twenty years after its parents had their right arms amputated. How could the procreative cells that formed the initial of that child’s life have in them a material representation from the right arms of those parents that had been amputated twenty years before the birth of the child? Suppose that the parents had undergone a much larger mutilation of the body, leaving them only the organs necessary to continued life and propagation, would the child have inherited the absent parts? Yes. Why? For the reason that sex is in the life of the individual, and not simply in the material substance of the body. A human body may have had some of the members removed but the physical life remains a unit. The embryo formed by the union of a masculine and a feminine cell will have a unit of physical life. During the nine months of gestation this unit of embryonic physical life will be incarnated in a unit of physical organism. Should a lobe of the brain of each parent, through which some mental or moral attribute functions, be removed, the child would inherit a unit of brain organism, for the reason that it inherited from the parents a unit of mental and moral life.

=Sex a resident part of life.=--These illustrations show that sex is vitally related to the physical, mental and moral life; that the physical nature of the child is the product of the union of the masculine and feminine principles of the physical life of the parents represented in the procreative cells; that the mental nature of the child is the product of the union of the masculine and feminine principles of the mental life of the parents represented in the procreative cells; that the spiritual nature of the child is the product of the union of the masculine and feminine principles of the spiritual life of the parents represented in the procreative cells. The three-fold life of a child is the product of the blending of the three-fold life of its parents.

=Heredity explained.=--The Bible tells us that “the blood is the life.” Science cannot express this truth better. The three-fold expressions of life are not in the blood. The blood furnishes life for every cell. Physical, mental and moral states are influenced by the conditions of the blood. These three natures meet and influence each other in the blood. Jesus appealed to the will of the patient. “Wilt thou be made whole?” “Arise, take up thy bed and walk.” “Stretch forth thy hand.” Jesus recognized the influence of the mind, expressed in will, as well as the spiritual expressed in faith, as a means of physical restoration. Every successful doctor, whatever may be his medical views, recognizes the value of a strong purpose to recover.

=Effects of different mental states.=--Men and animals alike lick a fresh wound. Nature teaches them that the saliva alleviates pain and heals the wound. If an angry person bites you, or you lick a wound after an hour of intense anger, you have a wound with all the symptoms of poison and it will be difficult to cure. Hundreds of cases are on record where angry mothers nursing their babies have thereby thrown them into convulsions or spasms. Jealousy will result in digestive disturbances. One can grieve so much over the loss of property or some member of the home by death as to injure the health. It is claimed that a great chemist took the various secretions from a subject that had been intensely angry for hours and succeeded in removing from the various secretions more than a score of poisons. In the case of another subject swayed by holy impulses, the kindest of feelings, the purest of love, he removed more than a score of wholesome, nutritious ingredients without a single poison.

=Mental and moral states influence the offspring.=--If right mental and moral states will give to the saliva, secreted from the blood, curative properties; and wrong mental and moral states will give the saliva a poisonous nature; if right mental and moral states influence the milk secreted by the breasts of a mother in a normal way; and wrong mental and moral states will so influence the mother’s blood as to throw her four-months-old nursing babe into spasms, cannot the father’s mental and moral states influence the creative secretions from his blood, and the mother’s mental and moral states, at the creative moment and during the nine months of embryonic and fetal development, influence the creative and life sustaining and life-developing secretions from her blood?

=Who was to blame?=--I once met a family during one of my lecture courses and was entertained in the home over night. Their children, five in number, all during my lecture picked at each other, scratched each other, fought each other, fussed, quarreled and cried. As we rode in the carriage to their home and during our visit those youngsters kept up this same line of entertainment. After I had retired the man stepped into my room and whispered to me that he and his wife were in great trouble, that they had been at the point of separation for ten years and asked me to teach them how to live happily together, and to be less miserable. I asked him to tell me the cause of their inharmony. “Oh, there is but one trouble between wife and me!” He spoke as if that were quite insignificant. Finally he told me that the trouble in the home was, “neither of us can control our tempers.” As he left my room I realized that for once in life I had a government contract on my hands. Then I mused: “Ten years of quarreling, ten years of disagreement, ten years of family feuds and family strife and these parents have transmitted more of bad disposition to their children than the children will be able to conquer in a lifetime, or these parents will be able to whip out of them before they are of age, chasing them around over a three-hundred-acre farm.” Continuing my meditation I thought: “If I had the power to make laws, I would make a law of mercy for such unfortunate children as these. That law would provide that where parents transmit as much unnecessary devilment to their children as these parents have to theirs, that the children should have the legal right to whip their daddies and mammies.”

=The child not an exact duplicate of either parent.=--These parents had produced their mental and moral states in their children.

These illustrations will help you to understand the philosophy of heredity. The two cells that unite to form the initial of every new life are elaborated from the blood of their respective parents and each cell has the physical, mental and moral natures of its parents in potential form. Were it possible for a child to inherit its size, form, features, disposition, tendencies, etc., from only one of its parents, and to grow to maturity uninfluenced by environment and education, it would necessarily be an exact duplicate of that parent. Because of its dual parentage, the maternal impressions received before birth, and the ever varying influences of environment and education, the child will be unlike any other person that ever lived.

=The child resembles both.=--These cells often remain in the bodies of the respective parents for several days before the initial of a life takes place. It follows that the mental and moral states, as well as the physical condition of the parents, for many days before conception takes place, will influence the child. There is no doubt but the remote conditions of the parents are transmitted, but not so certainly and so fully as the existing, or recently existing, states of the parents. At the initial moment the three natures of each of the parents will be greatly modified in the union of the cells. If the separate natures of the parents did not blend in the child, the child would have two mental natures, two moral natures and two physical natures. The modification of the inherited tendencies from each parent will depend largely upon the relative strength of these natures in the parents. Hence, where the same characteristic exists in each parent it will appear in the child in a reduced, duplicated or exaggerated form.

=Prenatal opportunities.=--During prenatal life, the forming child in the mother’s body is supplied with its physical, mental and moral building material from the mother’s blood. During the first twelve months of its postnatal life, or the period of lactation, the mother’s blood, environment and education are the child’s sources of physical development. During these periods the child is almost wholly pliable in the hands of its physical sculptors and mental and moral teachers. The prenatal existence of a child affords the parents their greatest opportunity to train the child, “in the way it should go.”

=Mother’s advantage.=--From these facts we see that the mother has the advantage of the father in influencing the forming body, the plastic brain and the sensitive soul of the child. Owing to the double standard of morals it is certainly a blessing to the world that this is true. Whatever is undesirable in the father, especially in his moral life, in a measure may be overcome by the mother. The story of Abraham’s two sons, Isaac, the true son, and Ishmael, the son of the bond woman, is a familiar illustration of this truth. Isaac became a good man; Ishmael became a bad man, the founder of the Ishmaelites, “whose hand was against every man.” Do you recall to memory a mother fallen in character? What has become of her children? Daughters fallen and sons worthless, often without an exception.

Suppose women all lived as men do, what would be the effect on the coming generation? Suppose men and women were alike temperate, honest, truthful and pure, our civilization would be as much superior to the present as the present civilization is superior to heathenism.

=The mother’s larger hereditary influence proven.=--Do you recall a drunken mother? How about the children? Dissipated and delinquent. A young lawyer, gifted, conceited, ambitious and eager for position and power had, according to his views, but one thing in his way to the goal of success--money. After thinking over the surest and best methods of getting money he decided to marry it. His first opportunity was a wealthy feeble-minded heiress. He married her. To their marriage five children were born. Three were positively mentally weak. The other two were noticeably so. Of these two, the first was a natural thief and the other a natural liar. Only one child resembled the young lawyer, the last one.

=When training should begin.=--It was a saying of a Yale president that “a child’s training should begin with its grandparents.” Another has said, “A child’s training should begin one hundred years before it is born.” There is more truth in those quaint sayings than many are willing to accept. Most parents give their children no premeditated and intelligent prenatal training, and many think that when the child has become accountable is soon enough for its training to begin.

=Children products of blind chance.=--There is an idea among many that every child comes straight from God and made to His order, and that parents are obediently to receive them when God sends them. Let the child be beautiful or homely, blonde or brunette, girl or boy, strong or feeble-minded, good or bad, no matter, God gave the child. Some think these things are all accidents, fortunes or misfortunes, or they belong to “the unknowable.” There are no accidents. Every effect has its cause. Nothing comes by chance alone. Unalterable and invariable law governs everything. The law of heredity is as unerring as the law of gravitation. Our ignorance of the law does not prevent its operation.

=Robbed of their birthright.=--The great mass of people are not well-born. Aside from the degenerate criminal and the feeble-minded, universally recognized products of heredity, most people are below what nature would teach us they should be. They were born with mediocre capacities for business success and intellectual attainment. Give them the earliest and best advantages and training that this country affords and marked improvements will be made by them, but they will not make great men in any line of life work, for the simple reason that they cannot. It takes some natural capacity for the highest success.

Occasionally a child of unusual gifts is born of parents much below the average. The parents and their friends are likely to believe the gift to be a special divine bestowment. But, if the child’s prenatal history could be fully known this would be accounted for on the basis of hereditary law. The unscientific farmer may occasionally raise a fine ear of corn or a very large crop of potatoes. But the intelligent, scientific farmer raises only the best.

=Sowing wild oats.=--If girls were addicted to loafing on the streets, swearing and telling vulgar stories, smoking and drinking, gambling and going to questionable places, we should not consider this good training for wifehood and motherhood. No intelligent man would choose such a girl to be the wife of his bosom, the queen of his home, the mother of his children. He is an ardent believer in the training of girls before marriage for wifehood and motherhood. Boys who engage in any of these sins are as much unfitting themselves for parentage as girls would be. “Oh, but a reformed rake makes the best husband.” If he makes the shadow of one, it will be a miracle of grace that he does it. No “rake” can in his own strength make a good father. If by God’s help he makes a good husband and father, this will be done in spite of his former life, and, not because he had been a “rake.” Sowing wild oats in youth does not make it easier to be good in after life, but more difficult. Boys and young men should live with a view to husbandhood and fatherhood.

=Immature parents.=--Experienced stock raisers will not breed inferior or immature stock. If one or both animals to be used for breeding purposes be young, immature, the offspring will be inferior. All leading physiologists place man’s maturity at about twenty-four and a woman’s at about twenty. If continence in thought and life controlled our social relations, it would be best for the human family if marriage did not take place until maturity. Under existing social conditions, sexual dissipation, and its dangers, it is perhaps best, in some cases, that they marry a few years younger. But for fifteen-and sixteen-year-old girls and nineteen-and twenty-year-old boys to marry is a decided physiological and psychological mistake. Children can no more parent normal children than can pigs, colts, and kids parent normal young. A great sociologist says that four to six per cent. more children whose mothers married at sixteen will die in their first year than among children whose mothers married at twenty; and that six to ten per cent. more children whose fathers married at twenty will die in their first year than among children whose fathers married at twenty-four.

=An ideal family.=--At the close of a lecture on heredity in a college town, a gentleman invited me to take dinner at his home the next day. I accepted his invitation. From eleven o’clock to twelve he and I sat in front of his little cottage home chatting pleasantly. When the college bell announced the noon hour, he turned and said, “When my two boys and my girl return home for dinner I want you to study them as examples of intelligently applied laws of parental preparation, prenatal training, good environment and the Grace of God.”

A few minutes later my attention was called to the rattling of the gate. Turning, I beheld two fine specimens of physical manhood and an equally fine specimen of physical womanhood. On closer acquaintance I found they were leaders in all their classes, leaders in the best circles of society and leaders in church work.

Dinner over, the young people returned to college; dishes were cleared away, and father, mother and I sat in front of that same cottage home; the conversation naturally drifted to heredity and to the young people. The father humbly but proudly said, “Professor, if wife and I should sell all we have, including our wardrobe, we could not raise $1,500. We have never been ambitious for broad acres of land, a palatial home or heavy deposits in the bank. We have had just one all-controlling purpose in our married life, and that has been to give to the world a family of children who will honor us after we are dead, be a blessing to the world and glorify God.” My reply was, “You have certainly erected to your memory three splendid monuments, monuments far grander than if you had worn out your muscle and brains in the production of sordid silver and gold and had left to your children a round million, and they, out of their gratitude, had erected to your memory a marble shaft piercing the very sky.”

I said it then, I have repeated it many times since, “I wish I had the money to pay the transportation and hotel bills of this family on my lecture trips and at the close of a lecture on heredity, could call this family to the platform as a living example of intelligently applied principles of eugenics.” If the initial moment of every child born into this world were intelligently planned for, its prenatal rights respected, its advent warmly welcomed, its environments wisely chosen and it were early led to accept Christ, every family would be equal to this family, and the next generation much superior to this. Will you, gentle reader, model your ideals after this home, teach these truths to others, and teach them to teach these truths to still others? If you will, then you will have done your part towards the world’s redemption.