ey were two cents more than he
expected. Grip and grind and gouge in the fourth generation--I suppose
it will be grip and grind and gouge in the twentieth generation. The
thirst for intoxicants has burned down through the arteries of a
hundred and fifty years. Pugnacity or combativeness characterize other
families. Sometimes one form of evil, sometimes another form of evil.
But

IT MAY BE RESISTED,

it has been resisted. If the family frailty be avarice, cultivate
unselfishness and charity, and teach your children never to eat an
apple without offering somebody else half of it. Is the family frailty
combativeness, keep out of the company of quick-tempered people, and
never answer an impertinent question until you have counted a hundred
both ways, and after you have written an angry letter keep it a week
before you send it, and then burn it up! Is the family frailty
timidity and cowardice, cultivate backbone, read the biography of
brave men like Joshua or Paul, and see if you cannot get a little iron
in your blood. Find out what the family frailty is, and set body, mind
and soul in battle array.

CONQUER YOUR WILL.

I think the genealogical table was put in the first chapter of the New
Testament, not only to show our Lord's pedigree, but to show that a
man may rise up in an ancestral line and beat back successfully all
the influences of bad heredity. See in that genealogical table that
good King Asa came of vile King Abia. See in that genealogical table
that Joseph and Mary and the most illustrious Being that ever touched
our world, or ever will touch it, had in their ancestral line
scandalous Rehoboam and Tamar and Bathsheba. If this world is ever to
be Edenized--and it will be--all the infected families of the earth
are to be regenerated, and there will some one arise in each family
line and open a new genealogical table. There will be some Joseph in
the line to reverse the evil influence of Rehoboam, and there will be
some Mary in the line to reverse the evil influence of Bathsheba.
Perhaps the star of hope may point down to your manger. Perhaps you
are to be the hero or the heroine that is to put down the brakes and
stop that long train of genealogical tendencies and switch it off on
another track from that on which it has been running for a century.
You do that, and I will promise you as fine a palace as the architects
of heaven can build, the archway inscribed with the words: "More than
conqueror."

A