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The hereditary tendency to disease among the progeny of persons related by blood, or of scrofulous or intemperate persons, or of persons whose physical condition is vitiated in various ways, is not seen at once, and may be entirely overlooked, for various reasons. In the first place, there may be only a strong tendency or predisposition to some infirmity, as blindness, deafness, insanity, idiocy, &c., which is not developed without some immediate exciting cause. Thus, I have known persons of a particular family become blind of one eye in consequence of a slight blow from a chip; then, after some years, become blind of the other from a trifling injury with a finger; or from other causes, so slight as to be borne with impunity by ordinary persons.

Now, if some members of such a family should, by great regularity of life, or by rare good-fortune, escape all accidents or exciting causes which would bring on disease, they would probably never suspect the existence of their danger. Or if they were fearful of the tendency, and by great caution escaped the danger, it would be exceedingly difficult to prove the existence of any hereditary taint.

It is common to say of certain families, of which, perhaps, only one person was quite mad, that "there is something odd about all the members of it." Now, if we could see the manifestations of tendencies to a morbid condition of the body, as we see the tendencies to insanity in strange actions of men, we should discover them where none are supposed to exist.

In the second place, diseased tendencies in parents, whether derived from their ancestors, or planted in their constitutions by intemperance or abuse, do not always manifest themselves by the reappearance of the same infirmity or disease in the offspring. Scrofula, for instance, will reappear in a thousand forms; it may be blindness, it may be deafness, it may be white swelling, it may be something else. I have known cases where it was impossible to find any instances of blindness occurring in a family previous to the one under examination, and yet, upon further inquiry, learned that there had been cases of insanity and mutism among the immediate relatives. I am forced to conclude, in such cases, that there is some peculiarity in the physical organization of one of the parents or progenitors which entails upon the offspring strong morbid tendencies.

But laying aside such cases, there are many where the hereditary tendencies to blindness are so manifest in parties who marry, that the probabilities of the offspring being blind are fearfully great. There are cases in which the parents are the authors of their children's blindness, as much as though they gouged their eyes out after they were born. They may sin in ignorance, but God will not remit the penalty of the sin because another had been committed in the neglect of mental culture.

A clear understanding of this law of the transmission of diseased tendencies, both of body and mind, will do much towards banishing disease and suffering from among the children of men.

It will be seen that the wit of man cannot devise a way of escape from the penalty of a violated law of nature; that not a single debauch, not a single excess, not a single abuse of any animal propensity, ever was or ever can be committed without more or less evil consequences; that sins of this kind are not and cannot be forgiven. There may be those who will harden their hearts and stiffen their necks, and be willing to bide the consequences to themselves for the sake of the sensual pleasures. But there will appear in the far-off and shadowy future the beseeching forms of little children, -- some halt, or lame, or blind, or deformed, or decrepit, -- crying, in speechless accents, "Forbear, for our sakes; for the arrows that turn aside from you are rankling in our flesh"; others, having the seeds of direful passions, -- envy, hatred, malice, uncleanness, -- say sadly, "O, bridle your passions, or they will tear us asunder like wild horses!" Then it shall be seen, that, if the fathers will eat sour grapes, the children's teeth shall be set on edge; that many a mother is responsible for the pride, the vanity, the lust of her daughter; that many a father is as guilty of the death of his son upon the gallows as though he twisted the rope about his neck with his own hands.

Then many a woman will rouse herself to the stern duty of observance of every law of health, of abstinence from all luxury and all slothfulness, for the sake of those dear ones that may be born to her; and many a man will abandon sensual indulgences which he would have clung to through life but for fear of cursing his future offspring with hellish passions.

Then will some soar to such an exalted pitch of virtue, as to forego their dearest hopes, and resolutely keep aloof from any relations of life that might cause them to hand down bodily or mental infirmities upon the innocent ones of the coming generations.

Then will light be thrown upon the laws of "the pestilence that walketh in darkness" from generation to generation, and the wisdom and goodness of God be made manifest even in them.