ies
of degradation and hardship exhibit themselves in the whole physical
condition of the people, affecting not only the features, but the frame.
Five feet two inches on an average,--pot-bellied, bow-legged, abortively
featured, their clothing a wisp of rags,--these spectres of a people
that were once well-grown, able-bodied, and comely, stalk abroad into
the daylight of civilization, the annual apparition of Irish ugliness
and Irish want."

Such is man as man himself has made him,--not man as he came from the
hand of the Creator. In many instances the degradation has been
voluntary; in others it has been forced upon families and races by the
iron hand of oppression; in almost all,--whether self-chosen by the
parents or imposed upon them,--the children and the children's children
have, as a matter of inevitable necessity, been born to it. For,
whatever we may think of the Scriptural doctrine on this special head,
it is a fact broad and palpable in the economy of nature, that parents
_do_ occupy a federal position; and that the lapsed progenitors, when
cut off from civilization and all external interference of a missionary
character, become the founders of a lapsed race. The iniquities of the
parents are visited upon the children. And in all such instances it is
_man_ left to the freedom of his own will that is the deteriorator of
man. The doctrine of the Fall, in its purely theologic aspect, is a
doctrine which must be apprehended by faith; but it is at least
something to find that the analogies of science, instead of running
counter to it, run in exactly the same line. It is one of the inevitable
consequences of that nature of man which the Creator "bound fast in
fate," while he left free his will, that the free will of the parent
should become the destiny of the child.

But the subject is one in which we can see our way as but "through a
glass darkly." Nay, it is possible that the master problem which it
involves no created intelligence can thoroughly unlock. It has been well
said, that the "poet's heart" is informed by a "terrible sagacity;" and
I am at times disposed to regard Milton's conception of the perplexity
of the fallen spirits, when reasoning on "fixed fate, free will,
foreknowledge absolute," and finding "no end in wandering mazes lost,"
much rather as a sober truth caught from the invisible world, than as
merely an ingenious fancy. The late Robert Montgomery has rather
unhappily chosen Satan as one of t