THE MORAL RESPONSIBILITY OF PARENTS IN HEREDITY.
The Duty of the Present to Future Generations.—Darwin on
Heredity.—Nature Inexorable.—The Mother’s Investment of
Moulding Power.—The Father’s Important Part in the Transmission
of Heredity.—The Parents Workers Together with God.—Parents
must Reap What They Sow.—The Law and the Gospel of Heredity
Contrasted.—The Children of Inebriates and Others.—Lessons
from Reformatory Institutions.—The Outcast Margaret.—The
Mother of Samson.—How a Child Became an Embodiment of “The
Lady of the Lake.”—The Woman Who Desired to be the Mother of
Governors.—Importance of this Study.
“Often do the spirits of great events stride on before the events,
And in to-day already walks to-morrow.”
“It is not just as we take it,
This mystical life of ours,
Life’s harvest will yield as we make it
A harvest of thorns or of flowers.”
“Instead of thy fathers shall be thy children, whom thou mayest
make princes in all the earth.”
Francis Galton says: “I conclude that each generation has enormous powers
over the natural gifts of those that follow, and maintain that it is a
duty that we owe to humanity to investigate the range of that power, and
to exercise it in a way that, without being unwise toward ourselves,
shall be most advantageous to the future inhabitants of the earth.”
Mr. Darwin maintains in his theory of pangenesis, that the gemmules of
innumerable qualities, derived from ancestral sources, circulate in the
blood and propagate themselves generation after generation still in the
state of gemmules, but fail in developing themselves into cells, because
other antagonistic gemmules are prepotent and overmaster them, in the
struggle for points of attachment. Hence there is a vastly larger number
of capabilities in every human being than ever find expression, and for
every patent element there are countless latent ones. The character of
a man is wholly formed through these gemmules that have succeeded in
attaching themselves, the remainder that have been overpowered by their
antagonists count for nothing.
Again he says, “The average proportion of gemmules modified by individual
variation under various conditions preceding birth clearly admits of
being determined by observation, for the children will in the average,
inherit the gemmules in the same proportion that they existed in their
parents. It follows that the human race has a large control over its
future forms of activity, far more than an individual has over his own;
since the freedom of individuals is narrowly restricted by the cost in
energy of exercising their wills.”
We might go on indefinitely making quotations from undisputed authorities
on this great science of heredity, for to-day it has become almost
an exact science. In view of this the exclamation of a writer in the
_Science of Health_ is very pertinent. “Who shall deliver us from our
ancestors? And if the fathers have eaten sour grapes, who on earth shall
prevent the children’s teeth being set on edge? Not nature. She is
inexorable. An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, is her law. But
between the unbroken law and its entailed consequences stands the mother,
invested with a power which makes her either a Nemesis or a redeemer.
This is the unwritten law in every mother’s heart, and I believe that in
all the ages there have been women who have hearkened unto its voice.
The son that Hannah prayed so earnestly for, and gave unto the Lord
before his birth, inherited a soul that had been to school before it drew
its first breath. Slaves suckle slaves; pure and enthusiastic women bring
forth saints and heroes. All history attests the fact that great men had
great mothers.”
That both in the law and the gospel of heredity, of the two parents,
the mother has a far greater influence we believe firmly; yet this does
not relieve the father from responsibility. The germ from him, which is
“bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh,” contributed to the formation of
the child in its beginning, must be of high nature and cultivation, seed
from a noble sire, or the little life is dwarfed from the outset, and the
mother must expend much precious time and strength in making good the
terrible deficiencies which such a beginning entails, and then mourn that
so much can never be overcome.
What our children become depends upon two conditions; what they are at
birth, and what environment makes them. That the parents may make of
their children almost what they will, that they are in a peculiar sense,
workers together with God in the creative and formative periods, that
they may by self-culture and painstaking reproduce a generation superior
to themselves, are all truths big with responsibility and meaning.
That we reap what we sow, is an inevitable law in the mental and moral
as in the physical sphere. While there is this great and awful law, I
am so thankful that we can emphasize the far greater and wider reaching
gospel of heredity. Into this we can put all the sweet promises whose
fulfillment is sure—if we are ever reaching up to the higher and nobler
aspirations of our nature, and not degenerating to the lower tastes and
inclinations.
For the law, we have, “visiting the iniquities of the fathers upon the
children unto the third and fourth generation.” For the gospel, “And
showing mercy unto thousands of (generations) of them that love Me and
keep My commandments.”
For the law, “The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth
are set on edge.” For law and gospel both, “As is the mother so is her
daughter.”
For gospel, “Instead of thy fathers shall be thy children whom thou
mayest make princes in all the earth.” For law, the sad history of the
children of inebriates, of tobacco users and of the insane; also the
history of many children born in polygamous Utah, of jealous mothers
outraged at the loss or division of the love of their husbands. Ugly,
misshapen children, mentally and morally. “Disinherited childhood,” is
written upon every line of their distorted lives. Go with our missionary
teachers and learn from the aching hearts of these mothers, the stories
of anguish that in the passing stamped indelibly the characters of the
little ones unborn; listen while they tell you that they know only too
well, when their children were stamped with the vindictive revengeful
spirits which so many of them manifest; or were bowed down with a burden
of sorrow too heavy to be borne. Hear the story of one such little one
that literally wept its short life away, without a cry, getting from
its mother an inheritance of tears, shed in silence under a pride that
forbade a moan.
Visit our almshouses and reformatories, our orphanages, our idiot
asylums, and get a few of the histories of the little inmates; trace
them back for three, four or five generations, and see how unmistakably
woe has generated woe, crime begotten crime, and disease brought forth
disease.
Let us study this, the dark side of the picture of heredity, and
seriously ask ourselves if it isn’t time a new reform was instituted and
the heart of philanthropy set to beating in sympathy, not only with this
great army of robbed, disinherited children, but as well with the yet
unborn generations. The great work for them must be done now, not after
they are ushered into a depraved, diseased existence.
“There is a story of one neglected little girl, poor Margaret, who never
had a home, and who grew up a wretched outcast, living a life of sin and
shame. After seventy-five years it was reckoned that her descendants
numbered twelve hundred; two hundred and eighty of whom were paupers,
and one hundred and forty habitual criminals, while most of the whole
degraded family cursed the country with vice, crime, pauperism, and
insanity.”
Finally for gospel, we have the indisputable fact that we may by
prayerful thought and systematic study make our children what we will.
Read the story of the angel’s appearance to the mother of Samson, when
the child was promised, and remember his direction. “And Manoah said,
How shall we order the child and how shall we do unto him? And the angel
of the Lord said unto Manoah, of all that I said unto the woman let her
beware. She may not eat of anything that cometh of the vine, neither let
her drink wine nor strong drink, nor eat any unclean thing; all that I
commanded her let her observe.” (Judges 13: 13, 14.)
A sweet story is told that illustrates the gospel side of heredity in a
marvelous way. A traveller in the west came to the house of a settler
in a remote frontier district, and asked for shelter for the night.
The parents had come from the east in an early day, and were people of
ordinary intelligence only. Among the children born to them in this
western home were several sons, coarse, boorish, and altogether what
their birth and environment would indicate. The traveller was struck
with the remarkable beauty and refinement of one child, a daughter. So
different was she from her brothers that he made bold to ask the mother,
if she could explain why the daughter was so different from her brothers,
and how in her surroundings she had developed such grace and beauty.
The mother looked up quickly with an intelligent smile, pleased that her
child should receive such appreciation. “Yes, I can tell you, I think,
why she differs so, and to me it is a strange thing and I have often
wondered if I have thought aright. Several months before my child was
born, one day there came to our cabin a colporteur with a variety of
books for sale. I was not much of a reader, but my life was a lonely
one, shut out from all society as I was, with nothing of comfort or
beauty about me. Only one of the books attracted my attention, a little
blue-and-gold copy of Scott’s Lady of The Lake. It was illustrated, and
as I turned it over in my hands, and caught now and then a word that
explained an illustration, I was possessed with a desire to have the
book. We were poor and I knew that my husband would not understand the
wish I had to own it. I handed it back to the man and he went on his
way. I could not get the thought of the book out of my mind, and did
not sleep an hour that night. As soon as the first peep of day began to
show itself, I rose and with the price of the book in my hand started
for the nearest neighbor, the next cabin where I thought the book agent
must have stopped for the night. I found him and got the book and came
home. Through all the months before the little one came that book was my
constant companion. I read it and reread it, until I knew much of it by
heart. Every scene of the book was as vivid as a reality to me. When the
daughter came she was the Lady of The Lake over again, and was always
just what you see her now.”
Dr. Holbrook says, “Every child born into the world is essentially
an experiment; we cannot tell what its chief characteristics will be;
these depend upon the potentialities stored up in the germ-plasm.”
Then how much depends upon the parents, that the germ-plasm be of fine
quality, and so insure fine products in their children. In his book on
Stirpiculture, Dr. Holbrook says, “The common people often get at truths
in a rude way long before the scientists do. Many parents tell us their
children are strongly influenced by some particular occupation of the
mother during pregnancy. So strong is this belief that many mothers are
in our time trying to influence the characters of their unborn children
by special modes of life, by cultivating music, or art, or science, in
order to give the child a love for these pursuits.”
Apropos to this statement, we can attest many instances that have come
under our immediate observation. Study and research along certain lines,
and in special directions have brought the results desired, and the
children have become what they were trained to be in intra-uterine life.
“What do you expect to do when you get to America?” asked a
fellow-passenger of a woman who was crossing the Atlantic about a
century ago. “Do? why raise governors for them.” And she was as good
as her word, for she became the mother of General John Sullivan, the
chief magistrate of New Hampshire, and of James Sullivan, governor of
Massachusetts. “She who thinks skim milk will transmit skim milk; she who
thinks cream will transmit cream.” This woman thought cream and lived it
and transmitted the best to her children.
Young women do not stop in your research with the few thoughts that can
be given in a chapter like this, but go on in the study until you know
what it has to teach you and what you may give to your unborn children,
by painstaking study and culture of yourself. Begin by weeding out
the habits and tendencies that you would not wish to transmit, and by
cultivating the qualities and accomplishments, which you would delight to
see repeated in your children.
Depend upon it the study and care will reward you bountifully, and you
will do your part in furthering the knowledge of this great science,
which means so much to the generations to come.
“A partnership with God is motherhood;
What strength, what purity, what self-control,
What love, what wisdom, should belong to her,
Who helps God fashion an immortal soul.”