We should keep watch not only over our words and deeds in their intent and purpose, but also in their possible influence over others. There may be liberties which in us lead to no danger, but which to others, with less stable character and less helpful environment, would be full of peril. It is part of our duty to think of these weaker ones and of the influence of our example upon them. We may not do anything, in our strength and security, which might possibly harm others. We must be willing to sacrifice our liberty, if by its exercise we endanger another's soul. This is the teaching of St. Paul in the words: "It is good not to eat flesh, nor to drink wine, nor to do anything whereby thy brother stumbleth"; and "If meat maketh my brother to stumble, I will eat no flesh for evermore, that I make not my brother to stumble."
How can we make sure of an influence that shall be only a benediction? There is no way but by making our life pure and good. Just in the measure in which we are filled with the Spirit of God and have the love of Christ in us, shall our influence be holy and a blessing to the world.
"'To-day' unsullied comes to thee--newborn, To-morrow is not thine; The sun may cease to shine For thee, ere earth shall greet its morn.
"Be earnest, then, in thought and deed, Nor fear approaching night; Calm comes with evening light, And hope and peace. Thy duty heed 'to-day.'" --RUSKIN.
If people's first thoughts were but as good and wise as their after-thoughts, life would be better and more beautiful than it is. We can all see our errors more clearly after we have committed them than we saw them before. We frequently hear persons utter the wish that they could go again over a certain period of their life, saying that they would live it differently, that they would not repeat the mistakes or follies which had so marred and stained the record they had made.
Of course the wish that one might have a second chance with any past period of time is altogether vain. No doubt there ofttimes is much reason for shame and pain in our retrospects. We live poorly enough at the best, even the saintliest of us, and many of us certainly make sad work of our life. Human life must appear very pathetic, and ofttimes tragical, as the angels look down upon it. There are almost infinitely fewer wrecks on the great sea where the ships go, than on that other sea of which poets write, where lives with their freightage of immortal hopes and possibilities sail on to their destiny. We talk sometimes with wonder of what the ocean contains, of the treasures that lie buried far down beneath the waves. But who shall tell of the treasures that are hidden in the deeper, darker sea of human life, where they have gone down in the sad hours of defeat and failure?
"In dim green depths rot ingot-laden ships, While gold doubloons, that from the drowned hand fell, Lie nestled in the ocean-flowers' bell With love's gemmed rings once kissed by now dead lips; And round some wrought-gold cup the sea-grass whips, And hides lost pearls, near pearls still in their shell Where sea-weed forests fill each ocean dell, And seek dim sunlight with their countless tips.
"So lie the wasted gifts, the long-lost hopes, Beneath the now hushed surface of myself. In lonelier depths than where the river gropes, They lie deep, deep; but I at times behold, In doubtful glimpses, on some reefy shelf, The gleam of irrecoverable gold."
Glimpses of these lost things--these squandered treasures, these wasted possibilities, these pearls and gems of life that have gone down into the sea of our past--we may have when the reefs are left bare by the refluent tides, but glimpses only can we see. We cannot recover our treasures. The gleams only mock us. The past will not give again its gold and pearls to any frantic appealing of ours.