791.
Eugenics.
Exodus 20: 5, 6. "Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; and showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments."
From Mount Sinai, God is thundering his commandment against bowing down to idols, a sort of worship which an unobserving man might say would do no harm, but which God knew would poison the bodies, minds and morals of not merely the generation that sinned, but of the generations to come. God is warning most solemnly that the iniquity of the fathers will run in the blood of the coming generations, and is pointing out that terrible law of heredity, so clearly established now by scientists, that blood will tell, that criminality, insanity, idiocy, tuberculosis, alcoholism, and other vices, whose strong corruption inhabits our germ-plasms, leap from parents to children, damning the offspring before it is even born. We may slam our Bibles shut and exclaim, "We will have none of this Biblical doctrine," but at once God speaks to us again, this time through the microscope, or through the statistics of the notorious Jukes family, thundering again that the iniquity of the fathers rushes on in the blood into the generations following, and curses the children before they ever see the light of day.
In later years, Israel forgot this solemn warning and allowed the vices of Solomon and Jereboam to defile the blood of succeeding kings until finally the brains and the morals of her kings rotted