Then no one will be isolated, but each will feel himself inseparably connected with many that went before and many that came after him.1 As in the physical system impressions made on the most distant parts of the body are conveyed by nerves to the common centre, so in the moral system of that great future may not each individual feel, as by a system of prolonged nerves, the various influences of others that have gone to form his character, or to guide his conduct, the effects too of his actions and his influence for good or evil on all to whom they have extended? May not in this way each individual be sensible to the various influences that have streamed in upon him from the beginning of time; sensible too, exquisitely pleasurably or painfully sensible, of the consequences of his conduct down to the end of the world?

What reason, then, is there for believing that conversion must, in every case, be a personal matter, and the turning to God, in all cases, a discretionary act of the individual?2 Does God extend the gifts of His grace only to individuals, doubt either that, once begun, the process may go on indefinitely. There is no stopping it. A man may live in the world long after he is dead, in the form of an active baneful influence, which shall deprave and corrupt successive generations." "A little wrong act, a light, careless utterance, may deposit a seed in some heart which shall bear the fruit of far greater sin than any which the sower of the seed commits; and he, remember, may have a fearful interest in this fruit, and in its seeds, and their growth, too, throughout all time."-(Rev. T. BINNEY.)

1 "Will a man meet his old acquaintances in the eternal world? Yea, and new ones also; all that the creations of his mind, his heart, his words, his example have attached to his own spirit, whether in one generation or another. Time and space are annihilated by moral influence, and a man walks eternally with the beings congenial to himself, or whom he has drawn to himself by the immutable attraction of powerful elements of character."-(Dr. CHEEVER.)

2" Since parents play so prominent a part in the history of the creation of the child's body, one can with difficulty refrain from the question, how much they contribute to the theogony (divine generation of the child's spirit) P... Not only does the bodily life of the parents cradle the bodies of the future, but also their spiritual life its spirit." (RICHTER: Levana.) "If we narrowly examine the relation of parents and child, we shall not fail to discover something like a law of organic connection as regards character subsisting between them. Such a connection as makes it easy to believe and natural to expect that the faith of the one will be propagated in the other. . . The character of the one is actually included in that of the other, as a seed is formed in the capsule, and being there matured by a nutriment derived from the stem, is gradually separated from it.”(Dr. BUSHNELL.)

and not likewise to families ?1 We know that physical, moral, and intellectual qualities are transmitted from parents to children by ordinary generation, and what reason is there to believe that religious faith and Christian principles may not be transmitted in the same way ?2 The faith of Timothy

"Why may not parents be the medium of transmitting to their offspring spiritual blessings as well as temporal advantages ?"-(Dr. T. BROWN: Sermons.) "I am thy servant, and the son of thine handmaid.' His design here, then, is to represent his piety as hereditary; and he mentions his mother, because to her especially, in all probability, his religious convictions and impressions were instrumentally due."-(Dr. W. L. ALEXANDER.) "In some, religion is like a gradual general growth-the growth of something that was always within them, for they cannot go back with distinct consciousness to any time when they had it not." (Rev. THOS. BINNEY.)

2 "Consider a very important fact in human physiology, which goes far to explain or take away the strangeness and seeming extravagance of the truth which I am endeavouring to establish, namely, that qualities of education, habit, feeling, and character have a tendency always to go in by long continuance, and become thoroughly inbred in the stock. We meet humble analogies of this fact in the domestic animals. The operations to which they are trained, and in which they become naturalized by habit, become predispositions in a degree in their offspring, and they, in their turn, are so much more easily trained on that account. The next generation are trained still more easily, till what was at first made habitual finally becomes functional in the stock, and almost no training is wanted. That which was inculcated by practice passes into a tendency, and descends as a natural gift or endowment. The same thing is observable on a large scale in the families of mankind." "It is not merely that laws, social modes, and instrumentalities of education descend, but it is that

the very type of the inborn quality is a civilized type. The civilization is, in great part, an inbred civilization. There is something functional in them which is itself configured to the state of art, order, law, property." —(Dr. BUSHNELL: Christian Nurture.) "Son of Creon, how true is the observation that noble children spring from noble fathers, and that the children of the bad are like in nature to their parents!"-(EURIPIDES.) "We observe children inheriting not only the general form and appearance of their parents, but also their mental and moral constitution-not only in their original and essential characters, but even in those acquired habits of life, of intellect, of virtue, or of vice, for which they have been remarkable.”—(British Quarterly Review.) "Hereditary transmission applies to psychical peculiarities as well as to physical peculiarities. While the modified bodily structure produced by new habits of life is bequeathed to future generations, the modified nervous tendencies produced by such new habits of life are also bequeathed; and if the new habits of life become permanent, the tendencies become permanent."- (HERBERT SPENCER: Principles of Psychology.) "There are entails of moral wealth, and virtue, too, is a patrimony."—(VINET.) "Health and vigour and beauty of body and of intellect pass from the parent to the child; and can it make no difference to the nature which the child inherits what may be the health and vigour and beauty of its parent's soul?"-(Rev. D. THOMAS.) "In these (moral evils), as well as in the former (physical evils),

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is spoken of in Scripture as that which had first dwelt in his grandmother, Lois, and his mother, Eunice, denoting that there was an identity in it, and that it had been communicated from them to him in some much more striking and peculiar manner than by mere teaching or example.1 It was a part of their nature, and as such had been communicated to him like any ordinary feature or quality of body or mind.

This view is much strengthened by the remarkable parallelism that we so frequently find drawn in Scripture between Adam and Christ-the first and second Adam-the full beauty and force of which is lost sight of in the prevailing systems of theology in the present day. We are told that "As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive,” and that "as by one man's disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous."2 The consequences of Adam's transgression are, we know, communicated to his posterity by ordinary generation, and may not the righteousness of Christ be imparted to the children of such as are of his adopted family in the same way ?3 May not the spirit of the parent turned from

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the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children; vicious propensities are transmitted in the blood as well as bodily disorders. This is true of multitudes in this Christian land, much more of the millions of heathendom who have sunk in degeneracy through the vices of past generations.”—(THOMPSON: Christian Theism.) "It is impossible, on mere physiological principles, that the children of a truly sanctified parentage should not be advantaged by the grace out of which they are born. And if the godly character has been kept up in a long line of ancestry, corrupted by no vicious or untoward intermarriages, the advantage must be still greater, and more positive."—(Dr. BUSHNELL.)

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1" Here we have distinctly alluded to the very important fact that there is even a kind of ante-natal nurture, which must be taken note of as having much to do with the religious preparations or inductive mercies of childhood." (Dr. BUSHNELL.)

"There is no obscurity in the words, 'As by one man's disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous. Accordingly, the relation subsisting between the two is this: as Adam by his ruin involved and ruined us, so Christ by His grace restored us to salvation."—(CALVIN: Institutes.) "Nay, the argument of the Apostle Paul in the 5th Chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, goes on the supposition that whatever may be asserted in this respect of the imputation of Adam's transgression may, with still greater truth, be asserted of Christ's righteousness.”—(Dr. T. BROWN: Sermons.)

"The corruption of our nature is universal. It is coeval with our very existence. It is communicated to us in our very formation in the womb." —(Rev. Dr. T. BROWN.) "We often speak of our children as heirs of our

the sin and error of his ways and living a life of holiness descend to his offspring by ordinary generation ?1 Then may children be at the same time born, and born again, and may with the first dawn of consciousness receive the regenerating influence of the Holy Spirit. And may we not

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depravity, of the sinful tendency which inheres in our nature. But is there not also a sense in which they are heirs of our grace? Is there not a sense in which goodness is hereditary as well as badness, in every sense, that is, in which moral qualities are heritable? Our iniquity passes upon them; but may we not also minister grace to them? Is the new life of the second Adam less potent than the old life of the first Adam? not this implied in the importance that is everywhere attached to pious parentage? Timothy is privileged by the unfeigned faith, not only of his mother, Eunice, but also of his grandmother Lois. Samuel, and Jeremiah, and John the Baptist, were consecrated from the womb. David makes it his boast and plea, O Lord, truly am I thy servant and the son of thy handmaid."". (Rev. HENRY ALLON.) From various passages of Scripture we learn "that in the line of natural descent from godly parents there were immense advantages, in relation to godliness, secured to the children; that, in point of fact, that was originally intended to be the rule (which, indeed, I am persuaded is very much more the rule than we sometimes suppose, and which would be still more the rule if we availed ourselves of its operation more reverently and intelligently), viz., that, as in the case of Timothy, the faith that dwelt first in the grandparents should likewise reproduce itself in grandson and in son. Agodly seed' can mean nothing else than this, that the godliness of the children is, in some way or other, and to a greater or less degree, derived from, and dependent on, the godly antecedents of their parents. And that the children of believing parents do stand in some relation of special advantage to the kingdom of Heaven is most unmistakably asserted by the great apostle of the Gentiles." -(Rev. W. ROBERTS.)

"By an established constitution," says Dr. Hopkins, "parents convey moral depravity to their children. And if God has been pleased to make a constitution, and appoint a way, in His covenant of grace with man, by which pious parents may convey or communicate moral rectitude or holiness to their children, they, by using the appointed means, do it as really and effectually as they communicate existence to them. In this sense, therefore, they may convey and give holiness and salvation to their children."-(System of Theology.) "Sin is transmissible, reversible. Why should not righteousness, under certain conditions, be so too ?"-(VINET.) "As children are made sinners and miserable by the parents without any act of their own, so they are delivered out of it by the free grace of Christ, upon a condition performed by their parents."-(RICHARD BAXTER.)

The

"For aught that appears, regeneration may, in some initial and profoundly real sense, be the twin element of propagation itself. parentage may, in other words, be so thoroughly wrought in by the spirit of God as to communicate the seeds of a godly, just as it communicates the seeds of a depraved and disordered character. Nor is it any objection as respects the children, that, except a man be born again he cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven; for, potentially, at least, they are thus born again, and so are as fit to be counted citizens of the kingdom as they are to be citizens of the state."-(Dr. BUSHNELL:

look forward to the time when the evils that have so long been transmitted as consequences of Adam's transgression shall have to give place to the benefits purchased for us by the death of Christ? Then as righteousness comes. to prevail on the earth shall the consequences of Adam's sin cease, and the children shall cease to be born with tendencies to evil, but only to what is good and right.2

Christian Nurture.) "Perhaps no one can tell when they became such, and it may be that some initiating touch of grace began to work inductively in them, by a process too delicate for human observation, even from their earliest infancy, or from their baptismal day. For there is a nurture of grace as well as a grace of conversion."-(Ditto.)

1 "If it be true that what gets power in any race by a habit or process of culture tends by a fixed law of nature to become a propagated quality, and pass by descent, as a property inbred in the stock, what is to

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be the effect of a thoroughly Christian fatherhood and motherhood, continued for a long time in successive generations of a family? What can it be but a general mitigation of the bad points of the stock, and a more and more completely inbred piety? The children of such a stock are born not of the flesh only, or the mere natural life of their parents; but they are born, in a sense most emphatic, of the Spirit also: for this parentage is differed, as we are supposing, age by age, from its own mere nature in Adam by the inhabiting grace of a supernatural salvation. (Dr. BUSHNELL.) It is a great mistake to suppose that men and women such as are to be fathers and mothers are affected only in their souls by religious experience, and not in their bodies. On mere physiological principles it cannot be true, for the mind must temper the body to its own states and changes. Since the soul is acting itself always into and through the body, when it becomes a temple of the Spirit, the body also must be, just as the Scriptures explicitly teach, undergoing with the soul a remedial process in its tempers and humours, and prospering in heaven's order even as the soul prospereth."—(Ditto.) "In every age there have been individuals who, as men, have uniformly been actuated by the aims and impulses of the religious life; and who, having 'feared God from their youth,' or even been, as He says it is possible to be, 'sanctified from the womb,' have been saved the agonies of self-crucifixion by the early supremacy of inward principle, the culture of pure tastes, and the protecting hedge of virtuous habits. Of course, what has thus been a fact again and again in separate individuals can be conceived of as being a fact in society at large, and might even be a fact.”—(Rev. T. BINNEY.)

2 The necessity of your exertions on behalf of the young," says Dr. T. Brown, addressing Sabbath-school teachers, "still continues; but that necessity will not always exist. By your efforts, combined with the instructions of pious parents, and devout masters, and faithful ministers, and zealous missionaries, a new era shall shortly dawn on the world. The ancient prophecy shall be fulfilled: after those days, saith the Lord, I will put my laws in their inward parts, and write them in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour and every man his brother, saying, know the Lord; for they shall all know Me, from the least of them to the