“Once more, we see all kinds of monomania and insanity.  We learn from them to recognize all sorts of queer tendencies in minds supposed to be sane, so that we have nothing but compassion for a large class of persons condemned as sinners by theologians, but considered by us as invalids.  We have constant reasons for noticing the transmission of qualities from parents to offspring, and we find it hard to hold a child accountable in any moral point of view for inherited bad temper or tendency to drunkenness,—­as hard as we should to blame him for inheriting gout or asthma.  I suppose we are more lenient with human nature than theologians generally are.  We know that the spirits of men and their views of the present and the future go up and down, with the barometer, and that a permanent depression of one inch in the mercurial column would affect the whole theology of Christendom.

“Ministers talk about the human will as if it stood on a high look-out, with plenty of light, and elbow-room reaching to the horizon.  Doctors are constantly noticing how it is tied up and darkened by inferior organization, by disease, and all sorts of crowding interferences, until they get to look upon Hottentots and Indians—­and a good many of their own race—­as a kind of self-conscious blood-clocks with very limited power of self-determination.  That’s the tendency, I say, of a doctor’s experience.  But the people to whom they address their statements of the results of their observation belong to the thinking class of the highest races, and they are conscious of a great deal of liberty of will.  So in the face of the fact that civilization with all it offers has proved a dead failure with the aboriginal races of this country,—­on the whole, I say, a dead failure,—­they talk as if they knew from their own will all about that of a Digger Indian!  We are more apt to go by observation of the facts in the case.  We are constantly seeing weakness where you see depravity.  I don’t say we’re right; I only tell what you must often find to be the fact, right or wrong, in talking with doctors.  You see, too, our notions of bodily and moral disease, or sin, are apt to go together.  We used to be as hard on sickness as you were on sin.  We know better now.  We don’t look at sickness as we used to, and try to poison, it with everything that is offensive,—­burnt toads and earth-worms and viper-broth, and worse things than these.  We know that disease has something back of it which the body isn’t to blame for, at least in most cases, and which very often it is trying to get rid of.  Just so with sin.  I will agree to take a hundred new-born babes of a certain stock and return seventy-five of them in a dozen years true and honest, if not ‘pious’ children.  And I will take another hundred, of a different stock, and put them in the hands of certain Ann-Street teachers, and seventy-five of them will be thieves and liars at the end of the same dozen years.  I have heard