Character, like fruit, gets rich flavor through living in a climate of extremes which give robustness by threatening very existence. The story of the transgression of Adam and his consort is illustrative rather than singular. The temptation set was the very stiffest to which human life, being what it is, could be subjected—a demand for self-discipline and obedience to mysterious law. It is interesting that the first recorded strain put upon the human will was not to do rather than to do. Seemingly it was the limitation of freedom, the restriction of choice, the narrowing of experience. In no other conditions could man have had a chance to gain character. Had our first human ancestors won their day without lapse, every succeeding generation would have had to do the same. You cannot inherit character. You must win it. Temptation is never eliminated from human life, as we know it. Its conquest in one form opens the door to its appearance in another form. Our earliest human ancestors having known the higher chose the lower. But this did not, either in their own case or in that of their offspring through a thousand generations, close the door to the attainment of character. Human life begins in conditions which threaten character and therefore becomes eligible for character. The complaint that there are those in the world who, because of hopeless environment, never have an opportunity, finds sympathetic echo in every heart, but it does not absolve us from responsibility to our own opportunity. Much is made of heredity by those who know little or nothing of the controversies which gather about the study of its operation. The popular interpretation presses hard upon its thorns and forgets even the existence of its blossoms. “The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation,” is the dominating thought which, by exclusive consideration, diseases the mind of many a man until his whole imaginative nature is employed in the service of some congenital, or supposed congenital, weakness to make him its victim. In this way fatalism is induced. Fatalism is a disease of the Mystic Sense which substitutes acquiescence for reaction. It is the straw committing itself to the river, not the oarsman using the current to his own advantage. Acquiescence is too tame a virtue for man, if indeed it be a virtue at all. Whatever credit we give to heredity for endowing us with the tendencies of our evil forbears, we must give it equal credit for endowing us with those of our good forbears. If you are determined to be fatalistic, be so fairly, recognizing the possible transmission of every kind of tendency. Conscious acceptance of gifts of strength from the past is a powerful counter-irritant to defend us against a real or imagined inheritance of weakness.