ings of
life our eyes may possibly be growing dim, and our ears dull of hearing,
and that God may be pressing upon us gifts of great price which we are
too dull to see or to accept--if our soul is sufficiently awake to feel
this, then the very feeling may of itself be the germ of new life in us.

And it is very certain, on the other hand, that if we are altogether
without any such feelings there is a risk, which even amounts to a
probability, that the hardening or deadening influences of custom and
tradition will sooner or later degrade our life. And if it should be
asked,--How comes it that we are so liable to be affected by this dulness
of spirit and of general habit?--we have to reply that it is because of
the sensitiveness of the human soul to surrounding influences.

It is because our souls are so receptive, so imitative, and in
consequence so easily perverted, darkened, blinded, or misled. I suppose
we are all of us conscious of this sensitiveness of the moral and
spiritual nature; we should all say, if questioned, that we are quite
aware of it, and that no one would dispute it. The soul of every child
or man, we should say, is a fine and delicate and sensitive instrument,
with the possibilities in it of we know not what Divine harmonies, but
easily spoilt.

And yet, when we look at all the common and traditional ordering of
daily life, whether in our educating of the young or in the influences
that we allow to prevail among young and old, it would seem sometimes as
if this thought of the soul's sensitiveness had never dawned upon us.
When we once really grasp this thought, or, let us rather say, when this
thought has once really fastened upon our mind, and fixed itself there,
so that it remains with us, and goes about with us; and when, in
consequence, we come to feel how easily any soul may be perverted, or
rendered hard or dull; in one word, how easily it may be degraded; then
it follows that we look with new eyes on many things, many customs, many
influences which the unthinking hardly notice, or notice only to
misjudge.

In the light of this feeling of the soul's sensitiveness, the thoughtful
man is very often intolerant of things which to others seem of little
moment, because he sees how they are tending to dull or deaden the eye of
the soul, or to pervert or to kill its finer instincts; and how, in
consequence, though tradition may have given them a sort of spurious
consecration, or the world in it