Each of us has two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents. In every receding generation the number doubles, from thirty-two to sixty-four, then to one hundred and twenty-eight, and so on; so that at the twentieth remove, omitting the factor of intermarriages, one has over a million ancestors! So many threads of nerve thrilling into him out of the dark past! So many invisible rivulets of blood tributary to the ocean of his heart, the collective experiences of all of them latently reported in his structure! His physiological mould and type, his mental biases and passional drifts, his longevity, and other prospective experiences and fate, are the resultant of these combined contributions modified by his own choice and new circumstances. What can be conceived more solemnly impressive, or to us morally more sublime and momentous, than this picture of an immortal personality, isolated in his own responsible thought amidst the universe, but surrounded by the mysterious ranks of his ancestry, all connected with him by spiritual ligaments which lengthen and multiply, but never break, as he tracks them, further and further, through the annals of time, through prehistoric ages, incapable of solution or pause till his faith apprehends the beginning of their tremulous lines in the creative fiat of God! Indulge in whatever theories we may, whether of continuous development or of sudden creation, it is through our parents that we receive our being. It is through our ancestry, spreading ultimately back to the limits of the human race, that each of us descends from God. By them it is that the Creator creates us. Well may the great Asiatic races, the soft and contemplative Brahmins, the child-like Chinese, the pure and thoughtful Parsees, worship their unknown Maker in forms of reverential remembrance and adoration paid to their known ancestors, gathering their relics in dedicated tombs or temples, cherishing their names and examples and precepts with fond devotion, celebrating pensive and glad festivals in their honor, preparing, around their pious offerings of fruits and flowers, little seats of grass, in a circle, for the pleased guardian spirits of their recalled fathers and mothers invisibly to occupy. Let not the reckless spirit of Young America, absorbed in the chase of material gain, and irreverent of everything but sensuous good, call it all a superstition and a folly. There is truth in it, too, and a hallowing touch of the universal natural religion of humanity.