Again, much caution is necessary in applying any principle of heredity. A genealogy, as we have seen, suggests our dependence in many ways upon our ancestry. But a man’s relations to his kindred are many and complicated; a quality, for instance, may be latent for one or more generations and then reappear, so that to all appearance a man inherits from his grandfather or from a more remote ancestor rather than from his father or mother. Conversely the presence of certain traits of character in a child does not show that any corresponding tendency has necessarily been active in the life of either parent. Neither must the influence of circumstances be confounded with that of heredity. Moreover, very large allowance must be made for our ignorance of the laws that govern the human will, an ignorance that will often baffle our attempts to find in heredity any simple explanation of men’s characters and actions. Thomas Fuller has a quaint “Scripture observation” that gives an important practical application of these principles:— “Lord, I find the genealogy of my Saviour strangely chequered with four remarkable changes in four immediate generations: “1. ‘Rehoboam begat Abiam’; that is, a bad father begat a bad son. “2. ‘Abiam begat Asa’; that is, a bad father a good son. “3. ‘Asa begat Jehosaphat’; that is, a good father a good son. “4. ‘Jehosaphat begat Joram’; that is, a good father a bad son. “I see, Lord, from hence that my father’s piety cannot be entailed; that is bad news for me. But I see also that actual impiety is not always hereditary; that is good news for my son.” Chapter III. Statistics. Statistics play an important part in Chronicles and in the Old Testament generally. To begin with, there are the genealogies and other lists of names, such as the lists of David’s counsellors and the roll of honour of his mighty men. The chronicler specially delights in lists of names, and most of all in lists of Levitical choristers. He gives us lists of the orchestras and choirs who performed when the Ark was brought to Zion(67) and at Hezekiah’s passover,(68) also a list of Levites whom Jehoshaphat sent out to teach in Judah.(69) No doubt family pride was gratified when the chronicler’s contemporaries and friends read the names of their ancestors in connection with great events in the history of their religion. Possibly they supplied him with the information from which these lists were compiled. An incidental result of the celibacy of the Romanist clergy has been to render ancient ecclesiastical genealogies impossible; modern clergymen cannot trace their descent to the monks who landed with Augustine. Our genealogies might enable a historian to construct lists of the combatants at Agincourt and Hastings; but the Crusades are the only wars of the Church militant for which modern pedigrees could furnish a muster-roll.