For gospel, “Instead of thy fathers shall be thy children whom thou mayest make princes in all the earth.” For law, the sad history of the children of inebriates, of tobacco users and of the insane; also the history of many children born in polygamous Utah, of jealous mothers outraged at the loss or division of the love of their husbands. Ugly, misshapen children, mentally and morally. “Disinherited childhood,” is written upon every line of their distorted lives. Go with our missionary teachers and learn from the aching hearts of these mothers, the stories of anguish that in the passing stamped indelibly the characters of the little ones unborn; listen while they tell you that they know only too well, when their children were stamped with the vindictive revengeful spirits which so many of them manifest; or were bowed down with a burden of sorrow too heavy to be borne. Hear the story of one such little one that literally wept its short life away, without a cry, getting from its mother an inheritance of tears, shed in silence under a pride that forbade a moan. Visit our almshouses and reformatories, our orphanages, our idiot asylums, and get a few of the histories of the little inmates; trace them back for three, four or five generations, and see how unmistakably woe has generated woe, crime begotten crime, and disease brought forth disease. Let us study this, the dark side of the picture of heredity, and seriously ask ourselves if it isn’t time a new reform was instituted and the heart of philanthropy set to beating in sympathy, not only with this great army of robbed, disinherited children, but as well with the yet unborn generations. The great work for them must be done now, not after they are ushered into a depraved, diseased existence. “There is a story of one neglected little girl, poor Margaret, who never had a home, and who grew up a wretched outcast, living a life of sin and shame. After seventy-five years it was reckoned that her descendants numbered twelve hundred; two hundred and eighty of whom were paupers, and one hundred and forty habitual criminals, while most of the whole degraded family cursed the country with vice, crime, pauperism, and insanity.” Finally for gospel, we have the indisputable fact that we may by prayerful thought and systematic study make our children what we will. Read the story of the angel’s appearance to the mother of Samson, when the child was promised, and remember his direction. “And Manoah said, How shall we order the child and how shall we do unto him? And the angel of the Lord said unto Manoah, of all that I said unto the woman let her beware. She may not eat of anything that cometh of the vine, neither let her drink wine nor strong drink, nor eat any unclean thing; all that I commanded her let her observe.” (Judges 13: 13, 14.)