As for the children of clergymen, the presumption is that they will adhere to the general belief professed by their fathers.  But they do not lose their birthright or their individuality, and have the world all before them to choose their creed from, like other persons.  They are sometimes called to account for attacking the dogmas they are supposed to have heard preached from their childhood.  They cannot defend themselves, for various good reasons.  If they did, one would have to say he got more preaching than was good for him, and came at last to feel about sermons and their doctrines as confectioners’ children do about candy.  Another would have to own that he got his religious belief, not from his father, but from his mother.  That would account for a great deal, for the milk in a woman’s veins sweetens, or at least, dilutes an acrid doctrine, as the blood of the motherly cow softens the virulence of small-pox, so that its mark survives only as the seal of immunity.  Another would plead atavism, and say he got his religious instincts from his great-grandfather, as some do their complexion or their temper.  Others would be compelled to confess that the belief of a wife or a sister had displaced that which they naturally inherited.  No man can be expected to go thus into the details of his family history, and, therefore, it is an ill-bred and indecent thing to fling a man’s father’s creed in his face, as if he had broken the fifth commandment in thinking for himself in the light of a new generation.  Common delicacy would prevent him from saying that he did not get his faith from his father, but from somebody else, perhaps from his grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice, like the young man whom the Apostle cautioned against total abstinence.

It is always the right, and may sometimes be the duty, of the layman to call the attention of the clergy to the short-comings and errors, not only of their own time, but also of the preceding generations, of which they are the intellectual and moral product.  This is especially true when the authority of great names is fallen back upon as a defence of opinions not in themselves deserving to be upheld.  It may be very important to show that the champions of this or that set of dogmas, some of which are extinct or obsolete as beliefs, while others retain their vitality, held certain general notions which vitiated their conclusions.  And in proportion to the eminence of such champions, and the frequency with which their names are appealed to as a bulwark of any particular creed or set of doctrines, is it urgent to show into what obliquities or extravagances or contradictions of thought they have been betrayed.