man was entirely left to individual caprice and
lust."

We are told in his _Table Talk_, that the great Luther was accustomed to
say that God's way of making man was very foolish ("sehr naerrisch"), and
that if God had deigned to take him into His counsel he would have
strongly advised Him to make the whole human race, as He made Adam, "out
of earth." And certainly if applied to the careless and reckless manner in
which procreation in Luther's day, as still for the most part in our own,
was usually carried out there was sound common sense in the Reformer's
remarks. If that is the way procreation is to be carried on, it would be
better to create and mould every human being afresh out of the earth; in
that way we could at all events eliminate evil heredity. It was, however,
unjust to place the responsibility on God. It is men and women who breed
the people that make the world good or bad. They seek to put the evils of
society on to something outside themselves. They see how large a
proportion of human beings are defective, ill-conditioned, anti-social,
incapable of leading a whole and beautiful human life. In old theological
language it was often said that such were "children of the Devil," and
Luther himself was often ready enough to attribute the evil of the world
to the direct interposition of the Devil. Yet these ill-conditioned people
who clog the wheels of society are, after all, in reality the children of
Man. The only Devil whom we can justly invoke in this matter is Man.

The command "Be fruitful and multiply," which the ancient Hebrews put into
the mouth of their tribal God, was, as Crackanthorpe points out,[424] a
command supposed to have been uttered when there were only eight persons
in the world. If the time should ever again occur when the inhabitants of
the world could be counted on one's fingers, such an injunction, as
Crackanthorpe truly observes, would again be reasonable. But we have to
remember that to-day humanity has spawned itself over the world in
hundreds and even thousands of millions of creatures, a large proportion
of whom, as is but too obvious, ought never to have been born at all, and
the voice of Jehovah is now making itself heard through the leaders of
mankind in a very different sense.

It is not surprising that as this fact tends to become generally
recognized, the question of the procreation of the race should gain a new
significance, and even tend to take on the character of a new r