CHAPTER X.

Voices of the Spring continued-The Probation-Acre-The Inextricable Entanglement of Responsibility in Human Life-Interminable reach of Moral Influence-Return of Evils to their Owners-Congregation of Congenial Spirits in the Eternal World.

THE Spring time has opened, and all human and material agencies are busy, with a restless and never-ending activity. Life and death are busy, death beginning life, and life springing out of death; and the germs, whether of good or evil, are no sooner committed to the bosom of the soil, be it physical or immortal, than they begin to work out what is in them. Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone, but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. The Spring time is this season of dying into life. Here and there the seed may fall, and merely go into the soil as compost, and so abide alone; but the rule is that of an indestructible germinating power both in man and nature.

This is our plot of ground, our time-acre, which, according as we cultivate it here, is to prove our vast reversionary inheritance in eternity. Of what nature, we ourselves must determine, as being the husbandmen; for we are all agriculturists, we are all landowners, we are all sowers. And our farms lying contiguous,

we

are all subject to reciprocal influences. No man liveth

to himself, and no man dieth to himself; it is quite impossible. If I sow my field with white weed, then the next season, my neighbor's field is sure to suffer for it. Thus we are not only sowers for ourselves, but for others. Neighbors sow for neighbors, friends for friends, enemies for enemies, parents for children, children for parents, servants for their masters, masters for their servants; and the different classes, professions, and grades in life affect one another. The involvement or entanglement of responsibility is indissoluble and inextricable. It began with Adam and Eve, Cain and Seth, Enoch and Enos, and can never stop, but runs on multiplying. The hand of Tubal-Cain is in the building of the ark, and Noah's husbandry prepares the graves for the nephews of Moses in the wilderness. Who can trace the vast, interminable, innumerable ramifications of influence and example, of second causes and consequences, of remote side-agencies with direct and illimitable results?

The airs that breathe over our own homesteads, gardens, farms, carry upon downy wings the germs of what we have sown for ourselves into the germinant domains of others. And the winds that blow across our neighbors' grounds bear into our own enclosures, and drop unseen, a reciprocal measure of others' living and characteristic agencies. The elements evaporated from the farm-yards and forests a thousand miles off, may come down with the rain upon the slopes of our native mountains. Nay, visible or invisible, across the ocean they may come. In this mighty moral connection that makes our world one world, and the human family one, what a man plants in Europe may tell in America, though he never dreamed of it, and what we plant in America may be found growing from the seed in Europe, before

we are aware of it. And all things throw their branches and their fruits into eternity.

If we cannot get out of this chain of causes and consequences, of influences given and received, then it becomes us to act carefully and wisely in it. We may have sifters and winnowers for our seed, if we will, and the word of God itself is as a great filterer, through which every stream of influence may be purified. If a person would know how it acts, directly and reflectively, let him read the 119th Psalm. A man in such a world as this is as one walking or working in the galleries of a mine, in hourly danger from explosions; he needs something like Sir Humphrey Davy's Safety Lamp amidst the pressure of perilous influences around him. Then he can walk securely. If not, he endangers not only himself but others. The very flame of a man's natural life is as an open blaze in the fire-damp; and the man himself is responsible for carrying the flame of mere nature, without the guards of grace, into such elements. If the consequences were seen and felt instantly, no man would dare do it, though they are not the less known for being at present invisible.

How often a winged word is dropped without a purpose, yet goes down into an immortal soul, and will be found a thousand times re-duplicated in eternity! How often a careless listener has received a life-long impression from a still more careless speaker! Words are dropped, and forgotten, and seen no more; even as a farmer scatters seed not only from his hand, but unknowingly from the basket, and goes his way, and sleeps and wakes; seen, no more than the seeds are seen when the earth has covered them, or than the forms of the uttered syllables are seen, upon the air that is stirred by them. Yet they may be everlasting, And the seed that the very fowls of the air seem to

steal from the farmer's wheat-field, they may sow somewhere else. A bird upon the wing may carry a seed that shall add a new species to the vegetable family of a continent; and just so, a word, a thought, from a flying soul, may have results immeasurable, eternal. You may not be able to follow them now, but they may follow you, hereafter; nor to trace them now, but you may reap the harvest hereafter.

Think not because things do not spring up now, to sight, they are therefore necessarily gone, or dying, or inactive. Impressions may be piled upon impressions, and whole beds of seeds on seeds, and layers of leaves mingled with them. Then afterwards you know not what the stirring of the soil may produce, nor at what period. For as sometimes it may happen that when you cut down a growth of oaks, there will spring up a forest of young pines, or when you burn over an enclosure of birch woods, you may see afterwards a wilderness of maple in its place, so you know not what forests of germs may lie in the heart-soil of man's nature and affections. There may be seeds of things unseen, inactive, and unknown, for the present, merely because another growth has prevented them, and keeps them down. And even if all should be changed into fossils, who knows what influence they may have upon the life of future generations! How many coal-fires may be kindled, how many steam-engines driven, by the discovered mineral beds of past opinions. Nearly half the world, even now, are living by or upon the fossil vices of past generations. Old errors are dug up, and brought into use again. The wheat buried three thousand years ago in Egyptian tombs may sprout in European gardens, and the fashions and luxuries of a sepulchred world may be reproduced in American drawingrooms. Indeed, if the pitch of Sodom and Gomorrah, both

physical and moral, could be disinterred, it would become merchandize. And so it is with opinion.

The

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be ; and that which is done, it is that which shall be done. moral habits of a man's life may be reproduced out of the jewels buried with his mummy.

"Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord; they rest from their labors, and their works follow them." Their good once done, its work ever after is spontaneous, kindly, and refreshing. But not in the future world alone do their works thus follow them; for in this world they live also, and from this world new harvests following on, will be reported in that, from every generation.

And is there not a reverse curse, for those of an opposite character, whose influence, alike immortal, by thought, word, and deed, sins on in like manner, in the reproduction of successive harvests of evil? What shall be said of the authors of licentious but fascinating books, immortal by the combination of their genius with the flame of depraved passion, the fires of which it both feeds upon and kindles anew, with fresh intensity? Into how many generations of minds may the seed thus sown go down, reproductive in every generation ? Their works follow them, but they never rest from their labors.

Those retributive

agencies that act for the bottomless pit, as the scavengers of the universe, shoot their successive loads of the evil so accumulated and fostered, into hell, at the door of every owner's mansion, and without mistake. The evils let loose in human society are sure to come back to their masters. "Some men's sins are open beforehand, going before to judgment, and some they follow after." Those that are open beforehand are not ordinarily of such