December 26

"Now all these things happened unto them for examples: and they are written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are come." 1 Corinthians 10:11.

What an untold blessing to one believer may be the dealings of God with another! As "no man lives to himself," so no Christian is tried and supported, wounded and healed, disciplined and taught, for himself alone. God designs by His personal dealings with us to expound some law of His government, to convey some lesson of instruction to the mind, or to pour some stream of consolation into the heart of others. Thus the experience of one child of God may prove the channel of peculiar and immense blessing to many. God, in this arrangement, is but acting in accordance with a law of our nature of His own creating—the law of individual and reciprocal influence. No individual of the human family occupies in the world a position isolated and alone. He is a part of an integral system. He is a member of a complete and vast community. He is a link in a mighty and interminable chain. He cannot think, nor speak, nor move, nor act, without affecting the interests and the well-being, it may be, of myriads. By that single movement, in the utterance of that one thought, in the enunciation of that great truth, he has sent a thrill of sensation along an endless line of existence.

Who can tell where individual influence terminates? Who can place his finger upon the last link that vibrates in the chain of intelligent being? What if that influence never terminates! What if that chain never ceases to vibrate! Solemn thought! In another and a remote period, in a distant and an undiscovered region, the sentiment, the habit, the feeling, once, perhaps, thoughtlessly and carelessly set in motion, has gone on working for good or for evil, owned and blessed, or rejected and cursed of heaven. Nothing can recall it; no remorse, nor tears, nor prayers, can summon it back; no voice can persuade, no authority command it to return. It is working its way through myriads of minds to the judgment-seat, and is rushing onward, onward, onward through the countless ages of eternity! Thought is immortal. Its propagation is endless. It never dies, and it never ceases to act. Borne along upon the stream of time, who can calculate the good, or compute the evil, or observe the end of a single life? My soul! aim to live in view of this solemn fact!

But especially is this true of the child of God. He belongs to a people within a people, to a church within a church, to a kingdom within a kingdom—designated as a "chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people." In this separate and hidden community, there is a divine cement, an ethereal bond of union, which unites and holds each part to the whole, each member to the body, in the closest cohesion and unity. The apostle more than recognizes—he emphatically asserts—this truth when, speaking of the church of God, he describes it as the "whole body fitly joined together, and compacted by that which every joint supplies." And again, when speaking of the sympathetic influence of the church, he says, "And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it." And so also of the consolation. When Paul penned the letter to the church at Corinth, he was with his companions in circumstances of deep trial. He was "cast down," and disconsolate. God sought to "stay His rough wind in the day of His east wind," by sending to him an affectionate Christian minister and beloved brother. "Nevertheless," writes the apostle, in recording the fact, "God, who comforts those that are cast down, comforted us by the coming of Titus." He who wrote these words has long since been in glory; and yet the experience he then traces upon the page has been, and is still telling upon the instruction, the comfort, and the holiness of millions, and will go on telling until time shall be no more. Remember, my reader, you must quit this world, but your influence will survive you. Your character and works, when dead, will be molding the living; and they, in their turn, will transmit the lineaments and the form of a mind whose thoughts never perish, to the remotest posterity. "He, being dead, yet speaks." What an expressive epitaph! A truer sentiment, and one more solemn, never breathed from the marble tablet. The dead never die! Their memory speaks! Their character speaks! Their works speak, and speak forever!