analytical question conclusively show that the wisdom of this world is tinctured and corrupted by the deadly foolishness which stings and blights man's mental powers, while it flatters itself that only health, justice, and purity flow from its hallowed fountains. And children, far more than adults, receive the full force of every vital folly which parents commit against the interests of the general humanity.

In the preceding chapters I have given you the true philosophy of the abuses and cruelties practised by adults upon the young under their control.

MANIA FOR THE POSSESSION OF WEALTH.

THE last two chapters bring me to another well-known form of insanity; which is the father of untold evil, misery, temptation, and crime.

During the wondrous and sacred period of pregnancy the wifely and maternal heart, beating its vital currents always through the sympathetic ganglia, may throb day and night in accord with the husband's positive psychological efforts to "become rich in both money and goods." And sometimes, too, the maternal heart itself may be inspired (or fired) with its own private propensities and ambitions; yea, her mind may be even flooded with uncontrollable desires to possess property, costly jewels, fine raiment, and the golden god, money! With these feelings in the ascendency, she vitally feeds and psychologically elaborates the forming child. Her mental states, originally derived from the husband, perhaps combined with the fuel furnished from the forest of her own bosom-are deposited (in egg state) in the brain-cells of her offspring. What next? This: An involuntary constitutional miser is organized and introduced to the human world.

Such a mind, when developed into maturity, may be

perfectly sensible and perfectly sane upon everything, except this one ever-burning desire. Being born with and organized into the mental energies, and into the very affections of the consciousness, this one "insane desire" is likely to act itself out in spite of the will, and in the very face of all moral and ennobling convictions of its unworthiness, which may occupy the higher faculties of the same mind. Two remarkable examples may be here introduced, and they are as follows:

"The Nashua Telegraph speaks in terms of unsparing contempt of a comparatively rich physician in Hillsborough county, Mass., whose meanness it esteems almost unparalleled. This man, having occasion to make a professional visit to his own mother, a poor old woman nearly ninety years old, exacted of her the full fee, even though knowing that she must spend many a weary night in knitting socks for sale to pay it. Nor was this his worst mercenary depravity; for at his mother's death, after she had been compelled to seek the support of another son, a farmer in straitened circumstances, the wealthy doctor presented his poor brother with a bill of three dollars, 'to horse hire, for conveyance of myself and wife to the grave,' although the horse was his own! Such meanness certainly revolts all that is respectable in average human nature; but does not its very extravagance, by indicating that it

is a natural moral disease, rather than an acquired artificial trait, entitle it to something like pity?

"Some years ago the culminatingly-mean descendant of a long line of notorious rich skinflints, in a neighboring State, was sick so nearly unto death that the attendant doctor and the doctors called in consultation vir

tually gave him up. At this crisis an old and excellent physician living near the sick man, but whose friendship and professional services had been alienated for a number of years past by some despicably mean act of the rich miser, heeded the despairing cry that called him to the bedside of his former patient, and, by some happy resource, rescued his enemy from death. For this he utterly refused compensation, though, in an hour of exceptional humanization of soul, the man whose life he had saved offered it liberally. In a few months thereafter the physician had occasion to call at the same house on other business. His only cow had strayed into a field belonging to his rich neighbor and late patient, and he went to offer-compensation! 'How much shall I pay you for the damage done?' he asked, shamefaced at his own question. The answer, after a pause, a suppressed sigh, and a nervous twitching of the lips, was nothing.' But in the manner and tone of this answer there was something to make the doctor draw from his pocket a half dollar, and extend it

toward his neighbor, saying, 'You must at least take this.' The man of score thousands, with all their inherited meanness for generations and generations, thrust both his hands fiercely into his pockets; turned red and pale alternately; looked at the coin, then tried to look away from it; choked, stammered something incoherently, drew one hand slowly from a pocket, and— snatched the coin like a wild beast! I can not help it!' he sobbed, and cried aloud like a child in utter shame and conscious irresistible degradation."

According to our philosophy, each mind, when sufficiently impressed with knowledge of and faith in its own great will-power, is endowed with energy adequate, and with self-government equal to a complete and perfect self-salvation from the servitude of such an inheritance. And yet we hold, in true charity, that every mind is measurably irresponsible until it becomes truly and adequately educated and impressed. In such a case, the application of psychology, coupled with that divine faith which inspired the command, "Arise, be thou healed!" is the only natural and infallible remedy. With such power and with such faith, in the redemptive energy of the Will, every mind is self-curable, and that, too, upon perfectly natural principles.

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