A child with a bad heredity, made and kept good by an ideal environment, is never as strong or safe as a child of good heredity and good environment. Every child at birth is the sum total of all the influences, good and bad, along the line of his lineage back to Adam. Every child has more or less of hereditary degeneracy. All children are exposed more or less to bad environment. All children need to accept Christ, to be transformed by His power and freed from the domination of inherited and acquired evil. Good heredity and good environment make it easy for children to accept Christ and live the Christ life. Bad heredity and bad environment make it difficult for children to accept and live the Christ life. It is the duty of parents to know and practice the laws of heredity and prenatal culture; to furnish the child as far as possible with a good environment and a sane knowledge of himself; and to influence him to accept Christ. Each child’s duty to himself is to recognize his conscious personal obligation to himself and to society, of mastering every inherited and acquired weakness, of developing fully every inherent possibility, and of accepting Christ as a necessity to the fullest attainment of the loftiest ideals. God’s greatest blessing, offered to every individual, is personal redemption through faith in His Son. These three agencies, good heredity, good environment, and redemption; or right generation, right education and regeneration, are essential to a perfect life. CHAPTER LI COURTSHIP, MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE =The modern girl.=--A quarter of a century ago a community knew a year ahead when one of its young women was going to be married. In this fast age, some parents don’t find it out until after their daughter has been married six months or more. When the author was a boy, the engaged girl spent her spare time piecing quilts, making feather pillows and beds, drying apples, peaches and pumpkins, making preserves, gathering garden seed and raising a flock of chickens. She had religious convictions. The Bible idea of a woman is a “help meet.” She was preparing to help meet the expenses of a home. The modern girl too often helps spend her gentleman friend’s hard-earned money at the soda fountain, on livery rigs and at the ten cent shows. Thousands of young men are not getting married to-day, because they are afraid of the expense of these modern help-eats, help-wears and help-spends. =Customs have changed.=--True, times and customs have changed and much of the work of women a quarter of a century ago is no longer profitable. The [Illustration] same is true of the work of men. But these changes do not justify a large number of girls idling away a number of years waiting for men to come along and marry them. Such girls make extravagant wives. They cannot know the value of a dollar.