The Penalty | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Sep 20, 1883

The Penalty.

DR. ANDREW MCFARLAND writes thus: "It is your stout old hero who goes to bed every night with liquor enough under his belt to fuddle the brains of a half dozen ordinary men, and yet lives out his threescore years and ten, that will be found at the head of the stock that pours into the world generation after generation such a crop of lunatics, epileptics, eccentrics, and inebriates as we often see. The impunity with which one so constituted will violate all physical law gets its set-off in a succeeding generation, when the great harvest begins. That 'the iniquities of the fathers are visited upon the children,' that 'the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth have been set on edge,' are truths that no scripture is needed to teach; in other words, he who sins through physical excess does not do half the harm to himself that he does to the inheritors of his blood. The penalty must be paid as surely as there is a seed-time and a harvest."