| Week-Day Religion |
Chapter 1 |
Page 3 |
We think further, and we find a wondrous network of attachments binding our little fragments of being to the great web of life around us. There are a thousand relationships which link us to our fellow men, to home, to church, to country, to society, to truth, to humanity, to duty; and every one of these connections implies responsibility. Obligations touch our lives on all sides. Duties come to us from every point. Every human relationship is solemn with its weight of responsibility.
We think again, and we find that we are in a world in which our minutest acts start results that go on for ever. The little ripple caused by the plash of the boy’s oar in the quiet bay goes rolling on and on until it breaks on every distant shore of the ocean; the word spoken in the air causes reverberations which go quivering on for ever in space; and these scientific facts are but feeble illustrations of the influences of human actions and words in the this world.
“Our many deeds, the thoughts that we have thought,
They go out from us, thronging every hour,
And in them all is folded up a power
That on the earth doth move them to and fro;
And mighty are the marvels that have wrought
In hearts we know not, and may never know.”
This fact charges every moment with most intense interest. The very air about us is vital, and carries the secret pulsations and the most unconscious influences of our lives far abroad; and not only so but these influences sweep away into eternity. There is not a moment of our life which does not exert a power that shall be felt millions of ages hence. There is something about the vitality and the immortality of human influence that is fearful to contemplate and that makes it a grandly solemn thing to live, especially when we remember that these qualities belong to the evil as well as the good of our lives.
“The deeds we do, the words we say,
Into thin air they seem to fleet;
We count them ever past,
But they shall last:
In the dread judgment they
And we shall meet.”
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