in life, may bear indeed a character differing wholly from the usual character of their parents, but altogether corresponding to the brief and unusual state which ruled their hour of beginning life.  So is it also in physical constitution.  The feeble and sickly have sometimes intervals of health, and the robust see months of languor and disease.  Hence, perhaps, the differences which are observable many times in the children of the same family with regard to health and natural vigor.

We cannot enter into the subject.  It is wide and extended as human nature itself.  It is also, apart from the Gospel of God’s grace, a very discouraging subject to the parent who contemplates it with seriousness, and with an earnest desire to ascertain the path of duty.  “How useless,” we may be tempted to exclaim, “any attempt to gain an end which is so uncertain as the securing any given constitution, either of body or mind, for my children.  To-day I am in health, full of cheerfulness and hope; a year hence I may be broken and infirm, a prey to depressing thoughts and melancholy forbodings.  My mind is now vigorous and active; who knows how soon the material shall subject the intellectual and clog every nobler faculty?  What will it suffice that to-day I feel myself controlled by good motives, and swayed by just principles, and possessed of a well-balanced character, since in some evil hour, influences wholly unexpected may gain the ascendancy, and I be so unlike my present self that pitying friends can only wonder and whisper, How changed! and enemies shall glory in my fall.  No.  It is vain to strive after certainty in this world of change and vicissitude, since none of us can tell what himself shall be on the morrow.  Do what I will, moreover, my child can only inherit a sinful nature.”  In the midst of gloomy thoughts like these, we turn to the story of Samson’s mother, and hear Jehovah directing her to walk before Him in the spirit of consecration, which is to be the life-long spirit of her son.  He surely intimates that the child’s character begins with, and depends upon, that of the mother.  A ray of light and encouragement dawns upon us.  True, we are fickle and changeable, and subject to vicissitude; but He, our God, is far above all these shifting scenes, and all the varying circumstances of this mortal life are under his control, and he can turn the hearts of men as He will; His counsel shall stand.  True, we are transgressors like our first father, partakers of his fallen nature, and inheritors of the curse; but “where sin abounds, grace does much more abound,” and “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us.”  For all the evils under which we groan, the Gospel has a remedy, and we have faith that in spite of all obstacles and difficulties, our Savior will yet present us, as individuals, faultless before the throne.  Why may not our faith take a still higher flight?  There are given to us exceeding great and precious promises.  The Holy