There is your heredity made to order for you—to _your_ order—the heredity of the slum; for the heredity, under which we groan, ever ready to give up, to lay the blame on the Almighty for our shortsightedness, our selfishness and love of ease,—this heredity is, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, just the sum of the bad environment which it was in our power to mend if we had but minded it while it was time. The hundredth case we can leave to the Lord, who punishes the sins of the fathers upon their children only in them that _hate_ Him. To those who would do His bidding, His work in the world, He is ever ready to show a way out. The way is to keep His commandments, the old, and the new that sums up all the rest. Loving our brother, we shall not have the heart to leave him in the slough; we shall be wanting to fight all the things that drag him down, and so we shall be mending not only his chances in the to-day, but we shall be cutting off the heritage of sin and sorrow and failure that would blight the to-morrow. We shall have lifted the curse that was laid upon man for forgetting his brother—for whoso forgets his brother hateth Him, that is what it means—and shall have helped the kingdom to come upon earth, even as it is in heaven above. By helping men to live the life of men, we shall bring them nearer to Him whose children we are. That is our heredity, the only real one: that we are children of God! With that backing, who can falter? What is there that you and I cannot do? And how dare we refuse to do it? “Weakness is what ails the young criminal, not wickedness,” say the prison superintendent, the prison chaplain, every one who knows. Lack of character, that is. How could he grow a character in such a setting as his? And for this setting we, not he, are responsible. He could not help himself. Think what it was we wasted! Only the other day the head-worker of one of the social settlements in New York told me of a little Jewish boy in her care, a little chap of eight, whose home is in a tenement where the father works early and late to make ends meet, his darling ambition that his boy shall some day be a rabbi; but the little fellow threw consternation into that household by declaring that he would not be a rabbi when he grew up, and why? “Because,” he told my friend, “I do not believe I could ever think of words beautiful enough to speak to God in.” Out of a slum tenement! How you would cherish it forever if your little one were to lift his soul and yours up to God with such a speech! Diamonds in the dust, truly.