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Still, however, a sort of hereditary respect for the Laird of Monkbarns, augmented by the knowledge of his being a ready-money man, kept up his consequence with this class of his neighbours. The country gentlemen were generally above him in fortune, and beneath him in intellect, and, excepting one with whom he lived in habits of intimacy, had little intercourse with Mr. Oldbuck of Monkbarns.
Obliged to go through the law school, he there found himself among a crowd of the sons of the bourgeoisie, who, without fortunes to inherit or hereditary distinctions, could look only to their own personal merits or to persistent toil. The hopes that his father and mother, then retired from business, placed upon him stimulated the youth's vanity without exciting his pride.
The least of them interested him, and, too, there were those with whom he always made friends easily, and there were his hereditary enemies whose presence gave a spice to life that might otherwise have become humdrum and monotonous. And so it was that on the fourth day he set out to explore the valley and search for his fellow-apes.
If one traces back the hereditary influences of a child for ten generations, it will be found that he has upwards of two thousand progenitors, any one of whom may give him a bias. And secondly, I cannot see that any system of socialism is consistent with the system of the family.
"Naw, sir!" exclaimed the youthful Grinnell, more insistently than before. He did not continue, for suddenly there came running down the road a boy of his own size, out of breath, and red and angry the pursuer, evidently, that the hereditary enemy had feared, for she crouched up against the fence with a whimper.
The habits then formed have become hereditary on the Continent, and though game laws still exist in England, there is little doubt that the blind prejudices of the ignorant and half-educated classes in that country against birds are, in some degree, at least, due to a legislation, which, by restricting the chase of game worth killing, drives the unprivileged sportsman to indemnify himself by slaughtering all wild life which is not reserved for the amusement of his betters.
Most of these, however, betake themselves to the bush, and resume their hereditary pursuits, just at the age when it is hoped they will become useful. Very frequently they die at that age of mesenteric disorders; and very few indeed become permanently civilized in their habits. Nothing could be more anomalous and perplexing than the position of the Aborigines as British subjects.
This is a great fact, and when properly considered, may well be accepted as a proof that the Bible, as a whole, is from God. What effect these arguments had on my mind in my early days, I do not exactly remember, but the probability is, that they helped to strengthen my instinctive and hereditary faith in the divine origin of the Bible.
Some of you will probably be more or less troubled by the pretensions of that parody of mediaeval theology which finds its dogma of hereditary depravity in the doctrine of psora, its miracle of transubstantiation in the mystery of its triturations and dilutions, its church in the people who have mistaken their century, and its priests in those who have mistaken their calling.
You shake a packet of seed into your forcing-frame; and while some grow, others pine and die, or struggle on under hereditary defect, showing indifferent blossoms late in the season, and succumb at length. So far as one could discover, the seeds were originally alike, they received the same care, they were fed by the same moisture and sunlight; but of no two of them are the issues the same.
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