CHAPTER XI.

THE MORAL RESPONSIBILITY OF PARENTS IN HEREDITY.

The Duty of the Present to Future Generations.—Darwin on Heredity.—Nature Inexorable.—The Mother’s Investment of Moulding Power.—The Father’s Important Part in the Transmission of Heredity.—The Parents Workers Together with God.—Parents must Reap What They Sow.—The Law and the Gospel of Heredity Contrasted.—The Children of Inebriates and Others.—Lessons from Reformatory Institutions.—The Outcast Margaret.—The Mother of Samson.—How a Child Became an Embodiment of “The Lady of the Lake.”—The Woman Who Desired to be the Mother of Governors.—Importance of this Study.

“Often do the spirits of great events stride on before the events, And in to-day already walks to-morrow.”

“It is not just as we take it, This mystical life of ours, Life’s harvest will yield as we make it A harvest of thorns or of flowers.”

“Instead of thy fathers shall be thy children, whom thou mayest make princes in all the earth.”

Francis Galton says: “I conclude that each generation has enormous powers over the natural gifts of those that follow, and maintain that it is a duty that we owe to humanity to investigate the range of that power, and to exercise it in a way that, without being unwise toward ourselves, shall be most advantageous to the future inhabitants of the earth.”

Mr. Darwin maintains in his theory of pangenesis, that the gemmules of innumerable qualities, derived from ancestral sources, circulate in the blood and propagate themselves generation after generation still in the state of gemmules, but fail in developing themselves into cells, because other antagonistic gemmules are prepotent and overmaster them, in the struggle for points of attachment. Hence there is a vastly larger number of capabilities in every human being than ever find expression, and for every patent element there are countless latent ones. The character of a man is wholly formed through these gemmules that have succeeded in attaching themselves, the remainder that have been overpowered by their antagonists count for nothing.

Again he says, “The average proportion of gemmules modified by individual variation under various conditions preceding birth clearly admits of being determined by observation, for the children will in the average, inherit the gemmules in the same proportion that they existed in their parents. It follows that the human race has a large control over its future forms of activity, far more than an individual has over his own; since the freedom of individuals is narrowly restricted by the cost in energy of exercising their wills.”

We might go on indefinitely making quotations from undisputed authorities on this great science of heredity, for to-day it has become almost an exact science. In view of this the exclamation of a writer in the _Science of Health_ is very pertinent. “Who shall deliver us from our ancestors? And if the fathers have eaten sour grapes, who on earth shall prevent the children’s teeth being set on edge? Not nature. She is inexorable. An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, is her law. But between the unbroken law and its entailed consequences stands the mother, invested with a power which makes her either a Nemesis or a redeemer. This is the unwritten law in every mother’s heart, and I believe that in all the ages there have been women who have hearkened unto its voice. The son that Hannah prayed so earnestly for, and gave unto the Lord before his birth, inherited a soul that had been to school before it drew its first breath. Slaves suckle slaves; pure and enthusiastic women bring forth saints and heroes. All history attests the fact that great men had great mothers.”

That both in the law and the gospel of heredity, of the two parents, the mother has a far greater influence we believe firmly; yet this does not relieve the father from responsibility. The germ from him, which is “bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh,” contributed to the formation of the child in its beginning, must be of high nature and cultivation, seed from a noble sire, or the little life is dwarfed from the outset, and the mother must expend much precious time and strength in making good the terrible deficiencies which such a beginning entails, and then mourn that so much can never be overcome.

What our children become depends upon two conditions; what they are at birth, and what environment makes them. That the parents may make of their children almost what they will, that they are in a peculiar sense, workers together with God in the creative and formative periods, that they may by self-culture and painstaking reproduce a generation superior to themselves, are all truths big with responsibility and meaning.

That we reap what we sow, is an inevitable law in the mental and moral as in the physical sphere. While there is this great and awful law, I am so thankful that we can emphasize the far greater and wider reaching gospel of heredity. Into this we can put all the sweet promises whose fulfillment is sure—if we are ever reaching up to the higher and nobler aspirations of our nature, and not degenerating to the lower tastes and inclinations.

For the law, we have, “visiting the iniquities of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.” For the gospel, “And showing mercy unto thousands of (generations) of them that love Me and keep My commandments.”

For the law, “The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” For law and gospel both, “As is the mother so is her daughter.”

For gospel, “Instead of thy fathers shall be thy children whom thou mayest make princes in all the earth.” For law, the sad history of the children of inebriates, of tobacco users and of the insane; also the history of many children born in polygamous Utah, of jealous mothers outraged at the loss or division of the love of their husbands. Ugly, misshapen children, mentally and morally. “Disinherited childhood,” is written upon every line of their distorted lives. Go with our missionary teachers and learn from the aching hearts of these mothers, the stories of anguish that in the passing stamped indelibly the characters of the little ones unborn; listen while they tell you that they know only too well, when their children were stamped with the vindictive revengeful spirits which so many of them manifest; or were bowed down with a burden of sorrow too heavy to be borne. Hear the story of one such little one that literally wept its short life away, without a cry, getting from its mother an inheritance of tears, shed in silence under a pride that forbade a moan.

Visit our almshouses and reformatories, our orphanages, our idiot asylums, and get a few of the histories of the little inmates; trace them back for three, four or five generations, and see how unmistakably woe has generated woe, crime begotten crime, and disease brought forth disease.

Let us study this, the dark side of the picture of heredity, and seriously ask ourselves if it isn’t time a new reform was instituted and the heart of philanthropy set to beating in sympathy, not only with this great army of robbed, disinherited children, but as well with the yet unborn generations. The great work for them must be done now, not after they are ushered into a depraved, diseased existence.

“There is a story of one neglected little girl, poor Margaret, who never had a home, and who grew up a wretched outcast, living a life of sin and shame. After seventy-five years it was reckoned that her descendants numbered twelve hundred; two hundred and eighty of whom were paupers, and one hundred and forty habitual criminals, while most of the whole degraded family cursed the country with vice, crime, pauperism, and insanity.”

Finally for gospel, we have the indisputable fact that we may by prayerful thought and systematic study make our children what we will. Read the story of the angel’s appearance to the mother of Samson, when the child was promised, and remember his direction. “And Manoah said, How shall we order the child and how shall we do unto him? And the angel of the Lord said unto Manoah, of all that I said unto the woman let her beware. She may not eat of anything that cometh of the vine, neither let her drink wine nor strong drink, nor eat any unclean thing; all that I commanded her let her observe.” (Judges 13: 13, 14.)

A sweet story is told that illustrates the gospel side of heredity in a marvelous way. A traveller in the west came to the house of a settler in a remote frontier district, and asked for shelter for the night. The parents had come from the east in an early day, and were people of ordinary intelligence only. Among the children born to them in this western home were several sons, coarse, boorish, and altogether what their birth and environment would indicate. The traveller was struck with the remarkable beauty and refinement of one child, a daughter. So different was she from her brothers that he made bold to ask the mother, if she could explain why the daughter was so different from her brothers, and how in her surroundings she had developed such grace and beauty.

The mother looked up quickly with an intelligent smile, pleased that her child should receive such appreciation. “Yes, I can tell you, I think, why she differs so, and to me it is a strange thing and I have often wondered if I have thought aright. Several months before my child was born, one day there came to our cabin a colporteur with a variety of books for sale. I was not much of a reader, but my life was a lonely one, shut out from all society as I was, with nothing of comfort or beauty about me. Only one of the books attracted my attention, a little blue-and-gold copy of Scott’s Lady of The Lake. It was illustrated, and as I turned it over in my hands, and caught now and then a word that explained an illustration, I was possessed with a desire to have the book. We were poor and I knew that my husband would not understand the wish I had to own it. I handed it back to the man and he went on his way. I could not get the thought of the book out of my mind, and did not sleep an hour that night. As soon as the first peep of day began to show itself, I rose and with the price of the book in my hand started for the nearest neighbor, the next cabin where I thought the book agent must have stopped for the night. I found him and got the book and came home. Through all the months before the little one came that book was my constant companion. I read it and reread it, until I knew much of it by heart. Every scene of the book was as vivid as a reality to me. When the daughter came she was the Lady of The Lake over again, and was always just what you see her now.”

Dr. Holbrook says, “Every child born into the world is essentially an experiment; we cannot tell what its chief characteristics will be; these depend upon the potentialities stored up in the germ-plasm.” Then how much depends upon the parents, that the germ-plasm be of fine quality, and so insure fine products in their children. In his book on Stirpiculture, Dr. Holbrook says, “The common people often get at truths in a rude way long before the scientists do. Many parents tell us their children are strongly influenced by some particular occupation of the mother during pregnancy. So strong is this belief that many mothers are in our time trying to influence the characters of their unborn children by special modes of life, by cultivating music, or art, or science, in order to give the child a love for these pursuits.”

Apropos to this statement, we can attest many instances that have come under our immediate observation. Study and research along certain lines, and in special directions have brought the results desired, and the children have become what they were trained to be in intra-uterine life.

“What do you expect to do when you get to America?” asked a fellow-passenger of a woman who was crossing the Atlantic about a century ago. “Do? why raise governors for them.” And she was as good as her word, for she became the mother of General John Sullivan, the chief magistrate of New Hampshire, and of James Sullivan, governor of Massachusetts. “She who thinks skim milk will transmit skim milk; she who thinks cream will transmit cream.” This woman thought cream and lived it and transmitted the best to her children.

Young women do not stop in your research with the few thoughts that can be given in a chapter like this, but go on in the study until you know what it has to teach you and what you may give to your unborn children, by painstaking study and culture of yourself. Begin by weeding out the habits and tendencies that you would not wish to transmit, and by cultivating the qualities and accomplishments, which you would delight to see repeated in your children.

Depend upon it the study and care will reward you bountifully, and you will do your part in furthering the knowledge of this great science, which means so much to the generations to come.

“A partnership with God is motherhood; What strength, what purity, what self-control, What love, what wisdom, should belong to her, Who helps God fashion an immortal soul.”