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XIV.
SECOND SERMON ON THE CHOLERA

Visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children.—Exodus xx. 5.

In my sermon last Sunday I said plainly that cholera, fever, and many more diseases were man’s own fault, and that they were God’s judgments just because they were man’s own fault, because they were God’s plainspoken opinion of the sin of filth and of habits of living unfit for civilised Christian men.

But there is an objection which may arise in some of your minds, and if it has not risen in your minds, still it has in other people’s often enough; and therefore I will state it plainly, and answer it as far as God shall give me wisdom.  For it is well to get to the root of all matters, and of this matter of Pestilence among others; for if we do believe this Pestilence to be God’s judgment, then it is a spiritual matter most proper to be spoken of in a place like this church, where men come as spiritual beings to hear that which is profitable for their souls.  And it is profitable for their souls to consider this matter; for it has to do, as I see more and more daily, with the very deepest truths of the Gospel; and accordingly as we believe the Gospel, and believe really that Jesus Christ is our Saviour and our King, the New Adam, the firstborn among many brethren, who has come down to proclaim to us that we are all brothers in Him—in proportion as we believe that, I say, shall we act upon this very matter of public cleanliness.

The objection which I mean is this: people say it is very hard and unfair to talk of cholera or fever being people’s own fault, when you see persons who are not themselves dirty, and innocent little children, who if they are dirty are only so because they are brought up so, catch the infection and die of it.  You cannot say it is their fault.  Very true.  I did not say it was their fault.  I did not say that each particular person takes the infection by his own fault, though I do say that nine out of ten do.  And as for little children, of course it is not their fault.  But, my friends, it must be someone’s fault.  No one will say that the world is so ill made that these horrible diseases must come in spite of all man’s care.  If it was so, plagues, pestilences, and infectious fevers would be just as common now in England, and just as deadly as they were in old times; whereas there is not one infectious fever now in England for ten that there used to be five hundred years ago.  In ancient times fevers, agues, plague, smallpox, and other diseases, whose very names we cannot now understand, so completely are they passed away, swept England from one end to the other every few years, killing five people where they now kill one.  Those diseases, as I said, have many of them now died out entirely; and those which remain are becoming less and less dangerous every year.  And why?  Simply because people are becoming more cleanly and civilised in their habits of living; because they are tilling and draining the land every year more and more, instead of leaving it to breed disease, as all uncultivated land does.  It is not merely that doctors are becoming wiser: we ourselves are becoming more reasonable in our way of living.  For instance, in large districts both of Scotland and of the English fens, where fever and ague filled the country and swept off hundreds every spring and fall thirty years ago, fever and ague are now almost unknown, simply because the marshes have all been drained in the meantime.  So you see that people can prevent these disorders, and therefore it must be someone’s fault if they come.  Now, whose fault is it?  You dare not lay the blame on God.  And yet you do lay the fault on God if you say that it is no man’s fault that children die of fever.  But I know what the answer to that will be: “We do not accuse God—it is the fault of the fall, Adam’s curse which brought death and disease into the world.”  That is a common answer, and the very one I want to hear.  What? is it just to say, as many do, that all the diseases which ever tormented poor little innocent children all over the world, came from Adam’s sinning six thousand years ago, and yet that it is unfair to say that one little child’s fever came from his parents’ keeping a filthy house a month ago?  That is swallowing a camel and straining at a gnat—that God should be just in punishing all mankind for Adam’s sin, and yet unjust in punishing one little child for its parents’ sin.  If the one is just the other must be just too, I think.  If you believe the one, why not believe the other?  Why?  Because Adam’s curse and “original” sin, as people call it, is a good and pleasant excuse for laying our sins and miseries at Adam’s door; but the same rule is not so pleasant in the case of filth and fever, when it lays other people’s miseries at our door.

I believe that all the misery in the world sprung from Adam’s disobedience and falling from God.  “By one man sin entered the world, and death by sin, and so death passed on all men, even on those who had not sinned after the likeness of Adam’s transgression.”  So says the Bible, and I believe it says so truly.  For this is the law of the earth, God’s law which He proclaimed in the text.  He does visit the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of those who hate Him.  It is so.  You see it around you daily.  No one can deny it.  Just as death and misery entered into the world by one man, so we see death and misery entering into many a family.  A man or woman is a drunkard, or a rogue, or a swearer: how often their children grow up like them!  We have all seen that, God knows, in this very parish.  How much more in great cities, where boys and girls by thousands—oh, shame that it should be so in a Christian land!—grow up thieves from the breast, and harlots from the cradle.  And why?  Why are there, as they say, and I am afraid say too truly, in London alone upwards of 10,000 children under sixteen who live by theft and harlotry?  Because the parents of these children are as bad as themselves—drunkards, thieves, and worse—and they bring up their children to follow their crimes.  If that is not the fathers’ sins being visited on the children, what is?

How often, again, when we see a wild young man, we say, and justly: “Poor fellow! there are great excuses for him, he has been so badly brought up.”  True, but his wildness will ruin him all the same, whether it be his father’s fault or his own that he became wild.  If he drinks he will ruin his health; if he squanders his money he will grow poor.  God’s laws cannot stop for him; he is breaking them, and they will avenge themselves on him.  You see the same thing everywhere.  A man fools away his money, and his innocent children suffer for it.  A man ruins his health by debauchery, or a woman hers by laziness or vanity or self-indulgence, and her children grow up weakly and inherit their parents’ unhealthiness.  How often again, do we see passionate parents have passionate children, stupid parents stupid children, mean and lying parents mean and lying children; above all, ignorant and dirty parents have ignorant and dirty children.  How can they help being so?  They cannot keep themselves clean by instinct; they cannot learn without being taught: and so they suffer for their parents’ faults.  But what is all this except God’s visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children?  Look again at a whole parish; how far the neglect or the wickedness of one man may make a whole estate miserable.  There is one parish in this very union, and the curse of the whole union it is, which will show us that fearfully enough.  See, too, how often when a good and generous young man comes into his estate, he finds it so crippled with debts and mortgages by his forefathers’ extravagance, that he cannot do the good he would to his tenants, he cannot fulfil his duty as landlord where God has placed him, and so he and the whole estate must suffer for the follies of generations past.  If that is not God visiting the sins of the fathers on the children, what is it?

Look again at a whole nation; the rulers of two countries quarrel, or pretend to quarrel, and go to war—and some here know what war is—just because there is some old grudge of a hundred years standing between two countries, or because rulers of whose names the country people, perhaps, never heard, have chosen to fall out, or because their forefathers by cowardice, or laziness, or division, or some other sin, have made the country too weak to defend itself; and for that poor people’s property is destroyed, and little infants butchered, and innocent women suffer unspeakable shame.  If that is not God visiting the sins of the fathers on the children, what is it?

It is very awful, but so it is.  It is the law of this earth, the law of human kind, that the innocent often suffer for other’s faults, just as you see them doing in cholera, fever, ague, smallpox, and other diseases which man can prevent if he chooses to take the trouble.  There it is.  We cannot alter it.  Those who will may call God unjust for it.  Let them first see, whether He is not only most just, but most merciful in making the world so, and no other way.  I do not merely mean that whatever God does must be right.  That is true, but it is a poor way of getting over the difficulty.  God has taught us what is right and wrong, and He will be judged by His own rules.  As Abraham said to Him when Sodom was to be destroyed: “That be far from Thee, to punish the righteous with the wicked.  Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?”  Abraham knew what was right, and he expected God not to break that law of right.  And we may expect the same of God.  And I may be able, I hope, in my sermon next Sunday, to show you that in this matter God does break the law of right.  Nevertheless, in the meantime, this is His way of dealing with men.  When Sodom was destroyed He brought righteous Lot out of it.  But Sodom was destroyed, and in it many a little infant who had never known sin.  And just so when Lisbon was swallowed up by an earthquake, ninety years ago, the little children perished as well as the grown people—just as in the Irish famine fever last year, many a doctor and Roman Catholic priest, and Protestant clergyman, caught the fever and died while they were piously attending on the sick.  They were acting like righteous men doing their duty at their posts; but God’s laws could not turn aside for them.  Improvidence, and misrule, which had been working and growing for hundreds of years, had at last brought the famine fever, and even the righteous must perish by it.  They had their sins, no doubt, as we all have; but then they were doing God’s work bravely and honestly enough, yet the fever could not spare them any more than it could spare the children of the filthy parents, though they had not kept pigsties under their windows, nor cesspools at their doors.  It could not spare them any more than it can spare the tenants of the negligent or covetous house-owner, because it is his fault and not theirs that his houses are undrained, overcrowded, destitute—as whole streets in many large towns are—of the commonest decencies of life.  It may be the landlord’s fault, but the tenants suffer.  God visits the sins of the fathers upon the children, and landlords ought to be fathers to their tenants, and must become fathers to them some day, and that soon, unless they intend that the Lord should visit on them all their sins, and their forefathers’ also, even unto the third and fourth generation.

For do not fancy that because the innocent suffer with the guilty that therefore the guilty escape.  Seldom do they escape in this world, and in the world to come never.  The landlord who, as too many do, neglects his cottages till they become man-sties, to breed pauperism and disease—the parents whose carelessness and dirt poison their children and neighbours into typhus and cholera—their brother’s blood will cry against them out of the ground.  It will be required at their hands sooner or later, by Him who beholds iniquity and wrong, and who will not be satisfied in the day of His vengeance by Cain’s old answer, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

We are every one of us our brother’s keeper; and if we do not choose to confess that, God will prove it to us in a way that we cannot mistake.  A wise man tells a story of a poor Irish widow who came to Liverpool and no one would take her in or have mercy on her, till, from starvation and bad lodging, as the doctor said, she caught typhus fever, and not only died herself, but gave the infection to the whole street, and seventeen persons died of it.  “See,” says the wise man, “the poor Irish widow was the Liverpool people’s sister after all.  She was of the same flesh and blood as they.  The fever that killed her killed them, but they would not confess that they were her brothers.  They shut their doors upon her, and so there was no way left for her to prove her relationship, but by killing seventeen of them with fever.”  A grim jest that, but a true one, like Elijah’s jest to the Baal priests on Carmel.  A true one, I say, and one that we have all need to lay to heart.

And I do earnestly trust in you that you will lay it to heart.  We have had our fair warning here.  We have had God’s judgment about our cleanliness; His plain spoken opinion about the sanitary state of this parish.  We deserve the fever, I am afraid; not a house in which it has appeared but has had some glaring neglect of common cleanliness about it; and if we do not take the warning God will surely some day repeat it.  It will repeat itself by the necessary laws of nature; and we shall have the fever among us again, just as the cholera has reappeared in the very towns, and the very streets, where it was seventeen years ago, wherever they have not repented of and amended their filth and negligence.  And I say openly, that those who have escaped this time may not escape next.  God has made examples, and by no means always of the worst cottages.  God’s plan is to take one and leave another by way of warning.  “It is expedient that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not” is a great and a sound law, and we must profit by it.  So let not those who have escaped the fever fancy that they must needs be without fault.  “Think ye that those sixteen on whom the tower of Siloam fell and slew them, were sinners above all those that dwelt at Jerusalem?  I say unto you, Nay, but except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.”

And I say again, as I said last Sunday, that this is a spiritual question, a Gospel sermon; for by your conduct in this matter will your faith in the Gospel be proved.  If you really believe that Jesus Christ came down from heaven and sacrificed Himself for you, you will be ready to sacrifice yourselves in this matter for those for whom He died; to sacrifice, without stint, your thought, your time, your money, and your labour.  If you really believe that He is the sworn enemy of all misery and disease, you will show yourselves too the sworn enemies of everything that causes misery and disease, and work together like men to put all pestilential filth and damp out of this parish.  If you really believe that you are all brothers, equal in the sight of God and Christ, you will do all you can to save your brothers from sickness and the miseries which follow it.  If you really believe that your children are God’s children, that at baptism God declares your little ones to be His, you will be ready to take any care or trouble, however new or strange it may seem, to keep your children safe from all foul smells, foul food, foul water, and foul air, that they may grow up healthy, hearty, and cleanly, fit to serve God as christened, free, and civilised Englishmen should in this great and awful time, the most wonderful time that the earth has ever seen, into which it has pleased God of His great mercy to let us all be born.

XV.
THIRD SERMON ON THE CHOLERA

I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the Fathers upon the children, unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.—Exodus xx. 6.

Many of you were perhaps surprised and puzzled by my saying in my last sermon that God’s visiting the sins of the fathers on the children, and letting the innocent suffer for the guilty, was a blessing and not a curse—a sign of man’s honour and redemption, not of his shame and ruin.  But the more I have thought of those words, the more glad I am that I spoke them boldly, the more true I find them to be.

I say that there is in them the very deepest and surest ground for hope.  “Yes,” some of you may say, “to be sure when we see the innocent suffering for the guilty, it is a plain proof that another world must come some day, in which all that unfairness shall be set right.”  Well, my friends, it does prove that, but I should be very sorry if it did not prove a great deal more than that—this suffering of the innocent for the guilty.  I have no heart to talk to you about the next life, unless I can give you some comfort, some reason for trusting in God in this life.  I never saw much good come of it.  I never found it do my own soul any good, to be told: “This life and this world in which you now live are given up irremediably to misrule and deceit, poverty and pestilence, death and the devil.  You cannot expect to set this world right—you must look to the next world.  Everything will be set right there.”  That sounds fine and resigned; and there seems to be a great deal of trust in God in it; but, as I think, there is little or none; and I say so from the fruits I see it bear.  If people believe that this world is the devil’s world, and only the next world God’s, they are easily tempted to say: “Very well, then, we must serve the devil in this world, and God in the next.  We must, of course, take great care to get our souls saved when we die, that we may go to heaven and live for ever and ever; but as to this world and this life, why, we must follow the ways of the world.  It is not our fault that they have nothing to do with God.  It is not our fault that society and the world are all rotten and accursed; we found them so when we were born, and we must make the best of a bad matter and sail as the world does, and be covetous and mean and anxious—how can we help it?—and stand on our own rights, and take care of number one; and even do what is not quite right now and then—for how can we help it?—or how else shall we get on in this poor lost, fallen, sinful world!”

And so it comes, my friends, that you see people professing—ay, and believing, Gospel doctrines, and struggling and reading, and, as they fancy, praying, morning, noon, and night, to get their own souls saved—who yet, if you are to judge by their conduct, are little better than rogues and heathens; whose only law of life seems to be the fear of what people will say of them; who, like Balaam the son of Bosor, are trying daily to serve the devil without God finding it out, worshipping the evil spirit, as that evil spirit wanted our blessed Lord to do, because they believed his lie, which Christ denied—that the glory of this world belongs to the evil one; and then comforting themselves like Balaam their father, in the hope that they shall die the death of the righteous, and their last end be like his.

Now I say my friends that this is a lie, and comes from the father of lies, who tempts every man, as he tempted our Lord, to believe that the power and glory of this world are his, that man’s flesh and body, if not his soul, belongs to him.  I say, it is no such thing.  The world is God’s world.  Man is God’s creature, made in God’s image, and not in that of a beast or a devil.  The kingdom, the power, and the glory, are God’s now.  You say so every day in the Lord’s Prayer—believe it.  St. James tells you not to curse men, because they are made in the likeness of God now—not will be made in God’s likeness after they die.  Believe that; do not be afraid of it, strange as it may seem to understand.  It is in the Bible, and you profess to believe that what is in the Bible is true.  And I say that this suffering of the innocent for the guilty is a proof of that.  If man was not made so that the innocent could suffer for the guilty, he could not have been redeemed at all, for there would have been no use or meaning in Christ’s dying for us, the just for the unjust.  And more, if the innocent could not suffer for the guilty we should be like the beasts that perish.

Now, why?  Because just in proportion as any creature is low—I mean in the scale of life—just in that proportion it does without its fellow-creatures, it lives by itself and cares for no other of its kind.  A vegetable is a meaner thing than an animal, and one great sign of its being meaner is, that vegetables cannot do each other any good—cannot help each other—cannot even hurt each other, except in a mere mechanical way, by overgrowing each other or robbing each other’s roots; but what would it matter to a tree if all the other trees in the world were to die?  So with wild animals.  What matters it to a bird or a beast, whether other birds and beasts are ill off or well off, wise or stupid?  Each one takes care of itself—each one shifts for itself.  But you will say “Bees help each other and depend upon each other for life and death.”  True, and for that very reason we look upon bees as being more wise and more wonderful than almost any animals, just because they are so much like us human beings in depending on each other.  You will say again, that among dogs, a riotous hound will lead a whole pack wrong—a staunch and well-broken hound will keep a whole pack right; and that dogs do depend upon each other in very wonderful ways.  Most true, but that only proves more completely what I want to get at.  It is the tame dog, which man has taken and broken in, and made to partake more or less of man’s wisdom and cunning, who depends on his fellow-dogs.  The wild dogs in foreign countries, on the other hand, are just as selfish, living every one for himself, as so many foxes might be.  And you find this same rule holding as you rise.  The more a man is like a wild animal, the more of a savage he is, so much more he depends on himself, and not on others—in short, the less civilised he is; for civilised means being a citizen, and learning to live in cities, and to help and depend upon each other.  And our common English word “civil” comes from the same root.  A man is “civil” who feels that he depends upon his neighbours, and his neighbours on him; that they are his fellow-citizens, and that he owes them a duty and a friendship.  And, therefore, a man is truly and sincerely civil, just in proportion as he is civilised; in proportion as he is a good citizen, a good Christian—in one word, a good man.

Ay, that is what I want to come to, my friends—that word man, and what it means.  The law of man’s life, the constitution and order on which, and on no other, God has made man, is this—to depend upon his fellow-men, to be their brothers, in flesh and in spirit; for we are brothers to each other.  God made of one blood all nations to dwell on the face of the earth.  The same food will feed us all alike.  The same cholera will kill us all alike.  And we can give the cholera to each other; we can give each other the infection, not merely by our touch and breath, for diseased beasts can do that, but by housing our families and our tenants badly, feeding them badly, draining the land around them badly.  This is the secret of the innocent suffering for the guilty, in pestilences, and famines, and disorders, which are handed down from father to child, that we are all of the same blood.  This is the reason why Adam’s sin infected our whole race.  Adam died, and through him all his children have received a certain property of sinfulness and of dying, just as one bee transmits to all his children and future generations the property of making honey, or a lion transmits to all its future generations the property of being a beast of prey.  For by sinning and cutting himself off from God Adam gave way to the lower part of him, his flesh, his animal nature, and therefore he died as other animals do.  And we his children, who all of us give way to our flesh, to our animal nature, every hour, alas! we die too.  And in proportion as we give way to our animal natures we are liable to die; and the less we give way to our animal natures, the less we are liable to die.  We have all sinned; we have all become fleshly animal creatures more or less; and therefore we must all die sooner or later.  But in proportion as we become Christians, in proportion as we become civilised, in short, in proportion as we become true men, and conquer and keep in order this flesh of ours, and this earth around us, by the teaching of God’s spirit, as we were meant to do, just so far will length of life increase and population increase.  For while people are savages, that is, while they give themselves up utterly to their own fleshly lusts, and become mere animals like the wild Indians, they cannot increase in number.  They are exposed, by their own lusts and ignorance and laziness, to every sort of disease; they turn themselves into beasts of prey, and are continually fighting and destroying each other, so that they, seldom or never increase in numbers, and by war, drunkenness, smallpox, fevers, and other diseases too horrible to mention, the fruit of their own lusts, whole tribes of them are swept utterly off the face of the earth.  And why?  They are like the beasts, and like the beasts they perish.  Whereas, just in proportion as any nation lives according to the spirit and not according to the flesh; in proportion as it conquers its own fleshly appetites which tempt it to mere laziness, pleasure, and ignorance, and lives according to the spirit in industry, cleanliness, chaste marriage, and knowledge, earthly and heavenly, the length of life and the number of the population begin to increase at once, just as they are doing, thank God! in England now; because Englishmen are learning more and more that this earth is God’s earth, and that He works it by righteous and infallible laws, and has put them on it to till it and subdue it; that civilisation and industry are the cause of Christ and of God; and that without them His kingdom will not come, neither will His will be done on earth.

But now comes a very important question.  The beasts are none the worse for giving way to their flesh and being mere animals.  They increase and multiply and are happy enough; whereas men, if they give way to their flesh and become animals, become fewer and weaker, and stupider, and viler, and more miserable, generation after generation.  Why?  Because the animals are meant to be animals, and men are not.  Men are meant to be men, and conquer their animal nature by the strength which God gives to their spirits.  And as long as they do not do so; as long as they remain savage, sottish, ignorant, they are living in a lie, in a diseased wrong state, just as God did not mean them to live; and therefore they perish; therefore these fevers, and agues, and choleras, war, starvation, tyranny, and all the ills which flesh is heir to, crush them down.  Therefore they are at the mercy of the earth beneath their feet, and the skies above their head; at the mercy of rain and cold; at the mercy of each other’s selfishness, laziness, stupidity, cruelty; in short, at the mercy of the brute material earth, and their own fleshly lusts and the fleshly lusts of others, because they love to walk after the flesh and not after the spirit—because they like the likeness of the old Adam who is of the earth earthy, better than that of the new Adam who is the Lord from heaven—because they like to be animals, when Christ has made them in his own image, and redeemed them with His own blood, and taught them with His own example, and made them men.  He who will be a man, let him believe that he is redeemed by Christ, and must be like Christ in everything he says and does.  If he would carry that out, if he would live perfectly by faith in God, if he would do God’s will utterly and in all things he would soon find that those glorious old words still stood true: “Thou shalt not be afraid of the arrow by night, nor of the pestilence which walketh in the noonday; a thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand, but it shall not come nigh thee.”  For such a man would know how to defend himself against evil; God would teach him not only to defend himself, but to defend those around him.  He would be like his Lord and Master, a fountain of wisdom and healing and safety to all his neighbours.  We might any one of us be that.  It is everyone’s fault more or less that he is not.  Each of us who is educated, civilised, converted to the knowledge and love of God, it is his sin and shame that he is not that.  Above all, it is the clergyman’s sin and shame that he is not.  Ay, believe me, when I blame you, I blame myself ten thousand times more.  I believe there is many a sin and sorrow from which I might have saved you here, if I had dealt with you more as a man should deal who believes that you and I are brothers, made in the same image of God, redeemed by the same blood of Christ.  And I believe that I shall be punished for every neglect of you for which I have been ever guilty.  I believe it, and I thank God for it; for I do not see how a clergyman, or anyone else, can learn his duty, except by God’s judging him, and punishing him, and setting his sins before his face.

Yes, my friends, it is good for us to be afflicted, good for us to suffer anything that will teach us this great truth, that we are our brother’s keepers; that we are all one family, and that where one of the members suffers, all the other members suffer with it; and that if one of the members has cause to rejoice, all the others will have cause to rejoice with it.  A blessed thing to know, is that—though whether we know it or not, we shall find it true.  If we give way to our animal nature, and try to live as the beasts do, each one caring for his own selfish pleasure—still we shall find out that we cannot do it.  We shall find out, as those Liverpool people did with the Irish widow, that our fellow-men are our brothers—that what hurts them will be sure in some strange indirect way to hurt us.  Our brothers here have had the fever, and we have escaped; but we have felt the fruits of it, in our purses—in fear, and anxiety, and distress, and trouble—we have found out that they could not have the fever without our suffering for it, more or less.  You see we are one family, we men and women; and our relationship will assert itself in spite of our forgetfulness and our selfishness.  How much better to claim our brotherhood with each other, and to act upon it—to live as brothers indeed.  That would be to make it a blessing, and not a curse; for as I said before, just because it is in our power to injure each other, therefore it is in our power to help each other.  God has bound us together for good and for evil, for better for worse.  Oh! let it be henceforward in this parish for better, and not for worse.  Oh! every one of you, whether you be rich or poor, farmer or labourer, man or woman, do not be ashamed to own yourselves to be brothers and sisters, members of one family, which as it all fell together in the old Adam, so it has all risen together in the new Adam, Jesus Christ.  There is no respect of persons with God.  We are all equal in His sight.  He knows no difference among men, except the difference which God’s Spirit gives, in proportion as a man listens to the teaching of that Spirit—rank in godliness and true manhood.  Oh! believe that—believe that because you owe an infinite debt to Christ and to God—His Father and your Father—therefore you owe an infinite debt to your neighbours, members of Christ and children of God just as you are—a debt of love, help, care, which you can, pay, just because you are members of one family; for because you are members of one family, for that very reason every good deed you do for a neighbour does not stop with that neighbour, but goes on breeding and spreading, and growing and growing, for aught we know, for ever.  Just as each selfish act we do, each bitter word we speak, each foul example we set, may go on spreading from mouth to mouth, from heart to heart, from parent to child, till we may injure generations yet unborn; so each noble and self-sacrificing deed we do, each wise and loving word we speak, each example we set of industry and courage, of faith in God and care for men, may and will spread on from heart to heart, and mouth to mouth, and teach others to do and be the like; till people miles away, who never heard of our names, may have cause to bless us for ever and ever.  This is one and only one of the glorious fruits of our being one family.  This is one and only one of the reasons which make me say that it was a good thing mankind was so made that the innocent suffer for the guilty.  For just as the innocent are injured by the guilty in this world, even so are the guilty preserved, and converted, and brought back again by the innocent.  Just as the sins of the fathers are visited on the children, so is the righteousness of the fathers a blessing to the children; else, says St. Paul, our children would be unclean, but now they are holy.  For the promises of God are not only to us, but to our children, even to as many as the Lord our God shall call.  And thus each generation, by growing in virtue and wisdom and the knowledge of God, will help forward all the generations which follow it to fuller light and peace and safety; and each parent in trying to live like a Christian man himself, will make it easier for his children to live like Christians after him.  And this rule applies even in the things which we are too apt to fancy unimportant—every house kept really clean, every family brought up in habits of neatness and order, every acre of foul land drained, every new improvement in agriculture and manufactures or medicine, is a clear gain to all mankind, a good example set which is sure sooner or later to find followers, perhaps among generations yet unborn, and in countries of which we never heard the name.