No but not for him alone. No matter what his rank, power, influence, he but shares the bounties which have been provided, in the munificence of Heaven, as the common inheritance of all his fellows. matter what his personal rights and interests, he is but a part of a great whole. He belongs to a system. No choice of his own, no social caste, no civil distinctions, can detach him from it. Linked with the world around him by a law of his nature and the decree of his Maker, every plan of isolation is abortive; and the very effort at separation and exclusiveness brands him as a miser, a misanthrope a selfish, heartless wretch, without natural affection or any redeeming principle. A brute in human form--a demon, with the lineaments of man-he is under the outlawry of a world itself, alas! but too ignorant of the law of love and the noble aims and ends of this mortal life. Bound together, as we are, by the ties of a common nature and of mutual dependence, every man is a fountain of influence, good or bad, conservative or destructive. Whether he will or not, he is an example. His language, spirit, actions, habits, his very manners, all tell-forming the taste, moulding the character, and shaping the course of others, to the end of time. No man liveth to himself. He can not. Apparently he may, but really he does not. His plans and his aspirations may all revolve around himself as a common centre, but within and without their orbits will be concentric circles, enclosing other agents and other interests. He may rear walls around his possessions, call his lands by his own name, and his inward thought may be, as the world phrase it, to take care of himself and his dependents, but he can neither limit the effect of his plans, nor forecast the inheritance of his estate. Another enters even into his labors. Disruptive changes abolish his best-concerted schemes, and scatter to the winds all the securities by which he sought to fence and individualize his own peculiar interest. But while all this is true, and constitutes the basis of a fearful responsibility, it is not exactly the idea in our text. In the declaration before us, the Apostle does not affirm a principle as predicable of our nature and its social relations, nor merely state a fact as resulting from an immutable law of our being; but he presents a moral rule, and erects it into a standard for the adjudication of character. He defines the rights of Jesus Christ our Lord, and the obligations of those who claim to be His disciples and representatives. |