We are constantly seeing weakness where you see
depravity. I don't say we're right; I only tell what you must often find
to be the fact, right or wrong, in talking with doctors. You see, too,
our notions of bodily and moral disease, or sin, are apt to go together.
We used to be as hard on sickness as you were on sin. We know better
now. We don't look at sickness as we used to, and try to poison it with
everything that is offensive, burnt toads and earth-worms and
viper-broth, and worse things than these. We know that disease has
something back of it which the body isn't to blame for, at least in most
cases, and which very often it is trying to get rid of. Just so with
sin. I will agree to take a hundred new-born babes of a certain stock
and return seventy-five of them in a dozen years true and honest, if not
'pious' children. And I will take another hundred, of a different stock,
and put them in the hands of certain Ann-Street or Five-Points teachers,
and seventy-five of them will be thieves and liars at the end of the same
dozen years.
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