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Our Duty to the Children: 58 total pages.

How real a factor heredity is in the problem of human development and regeneration may be seen from the fact that men in their state of early innocence were born into love for the Lord and to one another, and into the faculty for knowing, appropriate to those loves, as ani­mals are born into the affections and percep­tions appropriate to their life. Then as men grew from childhood to adult years, they needed only freely and intelligently to confirm the good that was natural to them. But hereditary evil has changed the inner structure of the mind and turned it away from heaven, so that children are born in absolute ignorance, and rationality must be developed by slow degrees and by external means. A factor which has produced such effects is not one to be ignored nor lightly 7 8 OUR DUTY TO THE CHILDREN treated. The seriousness of the question of heredity is still further seen when we learn that while some things of inheritance are compara­tively external and may in time be cast off, other things are more interior and enduring.

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