In much of the teeming literature of the day, and in the swift-flowing current of popular thinking, the doctrine of heredity is treated solely from a materialistic and pessimistic standpoint, and is associated with the demon rather than with the angel. Popular unbelief in spiritual entities, and popular ignorance of eternal Truth, hold heredity to be a mightier factor in our lives than infinite Love, and so, inferentially at least, as a mightier power per se.
Through the unnecessitated, unobligated, and responsible volition of "the carnal mind," which is "enmity against God" (and which is the unsolved and unsolvable "mystery of iniquity"), the way has been opened up for a flood-tide of evil influences to operate in seeming resistance to the supremacy of the divinity inherent in the real man; and so to the material sense of mortal mind heredity has seemingly become a power to be reckoned with in uncounted lives. Even as represented under the stern demands of ancient Hebrew jurisprudence, though the iniquities of the fathers were (in their consequences, not in their guilt, even then, be it remembered) to be visited upon the children of them that hate God and His law; yet God's loving-kindness and beneficence were to be shown unto a thousand generations of those who love Him and keep His commandments. The physical and moral consequences of the wrong-doing of the fathers were to be extinguished in a brief span of years, but the healthful outgrowth of the virtues of the fathers was practically to be diffused forever.
Later in the historic record, God is represented as saying through the prophet Ezekiel: "The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son." Day by day, we see children, born of the same parents, cradled in the same environment, receiving equal care and counsel and consideration, passing on together to adolescence and maturity, and yet the paths in which they walk and the destinies toward which they seem to determine are divergent as the poles. It seems impossible to dictate to the carnal mind, "Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther;" or, After this manner or that shall thy life be shaped. Out of the same dwelling go forth the twain who shall separate on the very threshold,—the one to ascend to the heights of moral rectitude, the other' to gravitate to the depths of depravity until awakened to the demands of divine law.
