ed, and investigation has within these few years shown, the parent of all these chronic tendencies, these cachexias, these scrofulas, these atrophies, this sterility, this atony, this gout, this rheumatism, this phthisis, this hereditary insanity with all its hydra heads and multiform shapes and shades, dark passions, furious lusts, stubborn obstinacies, scowling tempers, suicidal manias, gloomy revenges, gnawing jealousies, fretfulness, ill-humor; in short, all the various aberrations of mind, and reluctance to bear patiently the burdens which the Lord lays on man. All these chronic tendencies to disorder do combine and interlace with the natural corruption, the taint derived from Adam; and who, save God alone, shall say where one begins, and the other ends? The tendency to disorder of the functions aggravates the tendency to sin. The chronic taint in the constitution increases the chronic proneness to sin which Adam left us. The physical leprosy of the flesh unites with the moral leprosy of the soul. It is this combination of the two, aided often by stimuli, and almost always by large doses of violent inappropriate medicines antecedently given (medicines which a child may put into the constitution, but which ten men could not get out of it again), which festers in your jails, rots in your hulks, seethes in your lanes
