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All the evils of malice come from the human will, and these it is but for the race itself to say it will avoid. And for those brutal and imbecile beings so low that men have accounted them irresponsible, we know very well what causes tend to their production. Excess, violence, intermarriage, uncleanness, all help to beget a fool or a madman. The vices we encourage in ourselves not only corrupt our blood and breed, but they weaken those virtuous instincts in our posterity on which alone can be predicated the improvement of after times. A man may vitiate his posterity beyond their power of recuperation; but he cannot make them infallibly virtuous. Hence "the evil that men do lives after them—the good is oft interred with their bones."

The evils of ignorance may be spoken of as evils of necessary and of unnecessary ignorance. These evils altogether bear no comparison with the evils of malice. Did we but use with unfailing virtue the knowledge we have, there would be few complaints of evils necessary. We know well enough, and early enough, that temperance and exercise are necessary to good health: heeding what we know, we might have sound minds in sound bodies, comparatively speaking, in defiance of what we know not,—and having these, we should defy fear and melancholy, and many other personal discontents. Doubtless there are evils growing of necessary ignorance: man has not mastered the ways of nature, and many events now deemed unavoidable may yet subserve the skill of science. Lightning, of all things, was as the hand of God to the ancients. "Canst thou send the lightning ?" Yea, we can.