[Gutenberg 40609] • Memoir of Rev. Joseph Badger / Fourth Edition

Excerpt:

In so young a world as America, it has been held unsuitable for persons to spend much time in the tracing of pedigree, or to found important claims on family descent; nor can it accord less with the common sense of mankind than with the republican genius of the world, to say, that every genuine claim to human esteem is founded in character. In this is rooted every quality that can, of right, command the reverence of man. But, as character is not exactly isolated and independent of ancestral fountains, from which the innate impulses, capacity, and tendency to good and evil have flown, the subject of ancestry justly belongs to the history of every man's mind and life. Our ancestors flow in our veins. We retain them more or less in our characters always, so that the great stress which different countries have put upon this theme, rests on other than artificial and ostentatious reasons. In nature, below man, the various circuits and orders of[Pg 8] being do nothing more than to repeat ancestral forms and habits, to which the sweet rose, the eagle, and the strong-armed oak, are perpetual witnesses; and though man, by his God-like faculty of will is lifted out, in a great measure, from this necessity, he is so far a derivation from the past, that he ought to be seen in his connections with it. We therefore introduce the subject of Mr. Badger's ancestry as the chief part of the first chapter of this book.