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TOPIC: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks on Home Ideals (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: 68. "The Blood is the Life."
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"The Blood is the Life."
But important and practical as all this is, there is something else vastly more important, and of yet more intense practicality. And that is this: we may give to our children the sort of heredity we want them to have. We do give them a heredity, their chief heredity. We make their character; not wholly, but practically so. The generation that gives birth to the child is the most potent of all in influencing his character. It is more than all previous generations put together. All preceding generations exert an influence. There can be no question of that.
But we who give the child. its life have the most to say as to just what that life shall be in every regard, physically and mentally, and in the spirit that animates and controls. This at once makes heredity an immensely practical affair. This is the chief side of the question in which we are interested here. But our interest is warm to the point of being hot, and hot to the degree of white heat.
What we are makes our child's inheritance. His physical character,—health and vigour and traits; his mental powers and tastes and tendencies; his habit of being thoughtful or thoughtless, thorough or shallow, generous or close, frugal or shiftless, cheery or gloomy, methodical or slovenly,—these will largely get their bent from us, in what we are. His thought of God, and attitude toward Him, His prayerfulness and purposefulness, and devotion, will come in no small degree by blood inheritance. The babe becomes a second edition of his parents. What we are in ourselves determines very largely what he shall be in himself.
Now, this is true of our whole life. It is never too early to be thinking of this, for the whole sweep of the life is included. From the time when we begin making choices, and so making character, we are making up the heritage of other lives that some day will be here.
There can be no question that the rebellion of Absalom, which nearly broke up the Hebrew people, and affected the entire after-life of the nation, and sadly embittered the rest of David's years, was in David's blood long before it broke out in his son's actions. The chapter of ugly things that went before that rebellion had already been written by David's hand, in his own life, by his own choice.
Amnon's unholy passion, his cowardly indulging of it, and contemptible treatment of his half-sister; Absalom's lawless and bloody revenge, and then the rebellion itself,—all this was simply a working out of tendencies received from a father and pushed out to their logical conclusion. They could have been wholly restrained by training, but then they weren't.
One of the most famous illustrations of the power of heredity is that of Hannah and her son Samuel. It's a relief to turn to it from the later David story. For here the influence was all good. And the blessing of it affected the whole nation for long years after. It is the more striking because plainly the whole affair was of God's planning, in order to be able to carry out His broader plans for the nation. He must carry out those plans through some human channel. And He used heredity to get the right sort of a man.
While there is no means of counting exact years, it is quite likely that Hannah's soul-trying experiences ran through at least ten years, and maybe a much longer time. Those experiences were her childlessness, which every Hebrew woman peculiarly felt to be a reproach; the contemptible picking and nagging of her constantly for years by the rival wife of the home because of that childlessness; her own sore bitterness of spirit, notwithstanding her husband's tenderness; the drawing out of her soul to God in intense yearning prayer for relief that didn't come; and then at last the vow of dedication in the Tabernacle.
Those experiences running through long years re-made Hannah. She was no longer the woman she had been. God had made her over new. But it took much time, and very trying experiences to do it. He had to begin back with a woman, and patiently wait for her to be changed, in order to get the sort of man that He could use as a leader, to swing the nation back to Himself, and save His plan for a world.
Samuel was the son of the new Hannah made by those years of patient training and gentle discipline. He stands in one of the worst gaps in Israel's history, and saved the nation, and the world-plan that centred in the nation. Samuel is one of the greatest illustrations of the power of a mother to make a son what he comes to be.