igent. They depend less on circumstances, but
do not respond to them so well. In some nations everybody is by nature
so astute, versatile, and sympathetic that education hardly makes any
difference in manners or mind; and it is there precisely that
generation, follows generation without essential progress, and no one
ever remakes himself on a better plan. It is perhaps the duller races,
with a long childhood and a brooding mind, that bear the hopes of the
world within them, if only nature avails to execute what she has planned
on so great a scale.

[Sidenote: It is more blessed to save than to create.]

Generation answers no actual demand except that existing in the parents,
and it establishes a new demand without guaranteeing its satisfaction.
Birth is a benefit only problematically and by anticipation, on the
presumption that the faculties newly embodied are to be exercised
successfully. The second function of the family, to rear, is therefore
higher than the first. To foster and perfect a life after it has been
awakened, to co-operate with a will already launched into the world, is
a positive good work. It has a moral quality and is not mere vegetation;
for in expressing the agent and giving him ideal employment, it helps
the creature affected to employ itself better, too, and to find
expression. In propagating and sowing broadcast precarious beings there
is fertility only, such as plants and animals may have; but there is
charity in furthering what is already rooted in existence and is
striving to live.

This principle is strikingly illustrated in religion. When the Jews had
become spiritual they gave the name of Father to Jehovah, who had before
been only the Lord of Armies or the architect of the cosmos. A mere
source of being would not deserve to be called father, unless it shared
its creatures' nature and therefore their interests. A deity not so much
responsible for men's existence or situation as solicitous for their
welfare, who pitied a weakness he could not have intended and was
pleased by a love he could not command, might appropriately be called a
father. It then becomes possible to conceive moral intercourse and
mutual loyalty between God and man, such as Hebrew religion so earnestly
insisted on; for both then have the same interests in the world and look
toward the same consummations. So the natural relations subsisting
between parents and children become moral when it is not merely
derivation that u