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WH

FELLOWSHIP IN ACHAN'S FALL.
JOSHUA xxii. 20.

HEN Achan the son of Zerah committed a trespass in the accursed thing, wrath fell not alone upon Achan, but upon all the congregation of Israel; "and that man perished not alone in his iniquity." The text is one to arrest the thoughtless, and to suggest even to the most thoughtful matter for very serious consideration.

"Should one man sin, and would God be wroth with all the congregation?" That deprecatory question had been put twenty years before Achan's trespass, by the congregation of Israel, in the matter of Korah, when they fell upon their faces and pleaded with God, the God of the spirits of all flesh. And some centuries later the confession of King David in time of pestilence took this form that he had sinned and done wickedly; but those sheep-those subjects of his, involved in the penalty of his transgression, and dying off like sheep in a flock to the right and left of him, seventy thousand of them from morning to evening, from Dan even to Beersheba,what had they done?

If, indeed, says Dr. South, a man could be wicked and a villain to himself alone, the mischief would be so much the more tolerable. But the case, as he goes on to show, is much otherwise the guilt of the crime lights upon one, but the example of it sways a multitude; especially if the criminal be of note or eminence in the world. "For the fall of such any a one by any temptation (be it never so plausible) is like that

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of a principal stone or stately pillar, tumbling from a lofty edifice into the deep mire of the street; it does not only plunge and sink into the black dirt itself, but also dashes or bespatters all that are about it or near it when it falls." It is by no very subtle and far-fetched reasoning that a living divine essays to show that we may sin in the persons of other men, and so may sin in other countries which we never saw, and in years after we are in our graves. For may we not, he asks, be partakers in other men's sins of which at their commission we knew not, indeed at whose commission we would shudder? May we not in the moral world sometimes set the great stone rolling down the hill, with little thought of the ruin it may deal below? "Ah, you may live after you are dead, to do mischief; live in the evil thoughts you instilled, the false doctrines you taught, the perverted character you helped to form." And just as a righteous exemplar, "being dead, yet speaketh," and is a living means of good ages after he has been in his grave, may you, insignificant though you be, have left some impress of yourself upon minds more powerful than your own, and so be exercising a power to do harm to people you have never heard of, years after you are dead." Thus it is that far down into unknown time, and far away into the unknown distance, the moral contagion of our sin may be proved to spread; so that we may still be incurring guilt after the green turf is over us, and in lands which we have never seen and shall never see. "The evil principle we instilled, the evil example we set, may ripen into bitter fruit in the murderous blow which shall be dealt a century hence upon Australian plains!" Well may the note of exclamation follow: how strange, yet how inevitable, the tie which may link our uneventful life with the stormy passions of numbers far away! More wonderful than even the Atlantic cable is declared to be that unknown fibre, along which, from other men's sins, responsibility may thrill even to our departed souls: "a chain whose links are formed perhaps of idle words, of forgotten looks, of phrases of double meaning, of bad advice, of cynical sentiment hardly seriously meant ; yet carried on through life after life, through soul after soul,

till the little seed of evil sown by you has developed into some deed of guilt at which you shudder, but from participation in responsibility for which you cannot clear yourself." Every sin, we are in fine reminded, may waken its echo; every sin is reduplicated and reiterated in other souls and lives.

A distinguished French preacher, of the Reformed faith, has a striking discourse on what he entitles the solidarity of evil; and he too dilates upon the mysterious links which connect together persons and acts that appear to have nothing in common, suggesting melancholy examples of the contagion of guilt and its consequences, of the expansive power of corruption and its almost boundless results.

Our most powerful female writer of fiction has emphatically taught, if a striking story can teach, that there is no sort of wrong deed of which a man can bear the punishment alone; you can't isolate yourself, and say that the evil which is in you shall not spread. Men's lives are as thoroughly blended with each other as the air they breathe; evil spreads as necessarily as disease. "I know, I feel the terrible extent of suffering this sin of Arthur's has caused to others," so the good rector tells one who cherishes vengeance on the wrong-doer; "but so does every sin cause suffering to others besides those who commit it." The problem how far a man is to be held responsible for the unforeseen consequences of his own deed this speaker pronounces to be one that might well make us tremble to look into it; the evil consequences that may lie folded in a single act of selfish indulgence being a thought so awful that it ought surely to awaken some feeling less presumptuous than a rash and vindictive desire to punish.

In another of her books the same authoress takes pains to prove how deeply inherent it is in this life of ours that men have to suffer for each other's sins; so inevitably diffusive is human suffering that we can conceive no retribution which does not spread beyond its mark in pulsations of unmerited pain.

There is a passage in one of Madame de Charrière's letters in which, avowing her full recognition of the fact that she

must pay in person for the costly experience of life, she expresses the futile wish that others might not have to share in the costs, but owns with a sigh that the wish is futile, for one does nothing absolutely alone she says, and nothing so happens to us as to entirely exclude the participation of others: "On ne fait rien tout seul, et il ne nous arrive rien à nous seuls." We are taught by modern science that the slightest movement, of the smallest body, in the remotest region, produces results which are perpetual, which diffuse themselves through all space, and which, though they may be metamorphosed, cannot be destroyed.* Or again, as Mrs. Browning reminds us,—

"Each creature holds an insular point in space :
Yet what man stirs a finger, breathes a sound,
But all the multitudinous beings round,

In all the countless worlds, with time and place
For their conditions, down to the central base,
Thrill, haply, in vibration and rebound,

Life answering life across the vast profound,
In full antiphony.

If no good work that a man does is lost-the smallest useful work, as an octogenarian essayist assures us, continuing to be useful long after the man is dead and forgotten, so neither do bad actions die with the doer. "Future generations suffer for the sin of their ancestors, and one great crime or act of folly causes the misery of unborn millions." So all things, it is added, hang together in one unbroken chain, of which we see a few links, but the beginning and the end we see not and never shall see.

Seneca was writing for all time when he said that no man's error is confined to himself, but affects all around him, whether by example, or consequences, or both: "nemo errat uni sibi.” A latter-day philosopher assigns to a place among the most.

"Wave your hand; the motion which has apparently ceased is taken up by the air, from the air by the walls of the room, etc., and so by direct and re-acting waves, continually comminuted, but never destroyed."— Grove's Correlation of Physical Forces.

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