“Some of the little folks we watch grow up to be young women, and occasionally one of them gets nervous, what we call hysterical, and then that girl will begin to play all sorts of pranks,—­to lie and cheat, perhaps, in the most unaccountable way, so that she might seem to a minister a good example of total depravity.  We don’t see her in that light.  We give her iron and valerian, and get her on horseback, if we can, and so expect to make her will come all right again.  By and by we are called in to see an old baby, threescore years and ten or more old.  We find this old baby has never got rid of that first year’s teaching which led him to fill his stomach with all he could pump into it, and his hands with everything he could grab.  People call him a miser.  We are sorry for him; but we can’t help remembering his first year’s training, and the natural effect of money on the great majority of those that have it.  So while the ministers say he ’shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven,’ we like to remind them that ’with God all things are possible.’

“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 elbowroom 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