subjects of his grace and instruments of his will!” If you meditate deeply while you read, perhaps you will conclude that in His directions to this mother, our Heavenly Father has revealed to us wonderful and important things, which may answer us instead of direct communications from Himself, and which, if heeded and obeyed, will secure to us great peace and satisfaction.  Bear in mind, that he who speaks is our Creator—­that all the wonders of the human frame are perfectly familiar to Him, and that He knows far more than earthly skill and science have ever been able to ascertain, or even hint at, concerning the relations which Himself ordained.  He comes to Manoah’s wife with these words:  “Now, therefore, beware, and drink not wine nor strong drink, and eat not any unclean thing.  For, lo! thou shall conceive and bear a son; and no razor shall come on his head:  for the child shall be a Nazarite unto God from the womb.”  Can you discern in this only an allusion to Jewish customs and ceremonies, long since obsolete, and in no way interesting to us, except as a matter of history?  Can you not rather see gleaming out a golden rule which all would be blessed in following?  To us, in this history, Jehovah says, “Mother, whatever you wish your child to be, that must you also in all respects be yourself.”  Samson is to be consecrated to God by the most solemn of vows all the days of his life, and the conditions of that vow his mother is commanded to fulfill from the moment that she is conscious of his existence until he is weaned, a period of four years at least, according to the custom of her time.

These thoughts introduce to us a theme on which volumes have been written and spoken.  Men of deep research and profound judgment have been ready to say to all the parents of earth, “Whatever ye are such will also your children prove always, and in every particular to be;” and there are not wanting multitudes of facts to strengthen and confirm the position.  In certain aspects of it it is assuredly true, since the principal characteristics of the race remain from age to age the same.  Nor is it disproved by what seem at first adverse facts, for although children seem in physical and intellectual constitution often the direct opposite of their parents, yet a close study into the history of families may only prove, that if unlike those parents in general character, they have nevertheless inherited that particular phase which governed the period from which they date their existence.  No person bears through life precisely the same dispositions, or is at all times equally under the same influences or governed by the same motives.  The gentle and amiable by nature may come into circumstances which shall induce unwonted irritability and ill-humor; the irascible and passionate, surrounded in some favored time, by all that heart can wish, may seem as lovely as though no evil tempers had ever deformed them; and the children who may be the offspring of these episodes