Matthew 21:28-32 But what think you? A certain man had two sons; and he came to the first, and said, Son, go work to day in my vineyard.… We have received, happily, a constitution which is adapted to the exigencies of human life. Men's minds do not act as printer's types do, every letter being selected, and every sentence being spelt out, and, when it is stamped, being stamped complete. Men, on the other hand, are so organized that they have in every part of their nature an element of what may be called instantaneity — the instantaneous effusion of feeling; the immediate perception of what is best or not best; a recognition of what is good or what is bad, what is right or what is wrong, what is safe or what is dangerous — instantaneousness of purpose. This element or principle of instantaneity of course varies. The dull and lethargic are slow; the intermediate are faster than this extreme, and less rapid than the other extreme; and the more finely organized, the higher, natures have it so that it flashes and plays without any perceptible pause between the impulses and the result. But all have it; without it life would be impossible. When men walk the very body has it. If a man should be obliged, as one that is just getting out from an attack of inflammatory rheumatism, or as one who is in the last stages of lumbago (and I speak feelingly), to pick his way as he walks, and think, "That brick is set a little sidewise," and to calculate and say, "How many inches must I lift my foot, to step over it?" how long do you think it would take him to walk from Brooklyn to New York? Going and coming back would consume almost the whole day, and the errands of life would be neglected. But a man in health is not obliged to do this. The foot itself does the calculating. The foot sees without your thinking or seeing. It rises and lowers of its own accord. You instinctively avoid the slough. You leap the little gulfs. You know the best way to accommodate your whole body to the ten thousand varying conditions of matter. The law of gravitation, of light, of heat, of magnetism, of liquidity or solidity, of things sharp or blunt — all these the body, without any care on your part, attends to. No man walks into a mortar-bed. No man stumbles over a sand-heap. Men jump, not on iron fences, but on featherbeds; and having jumped, they never get up and say, "Ah! what if we had not thought of that! How lucky it was!" Suppose a man were obliged, for all the operations of the body, to have a little monitor in his mind that should be on the look-out for him, and he should say, "If I lift my hand so and so, or do so and so with it, I shall have rheumatism in the shoulder, and therefore I won't do it?" What if such calculation as that had to be made before every movement of the body? (H. W. Beecher.) Parallel Verses KJV: But what think ye? A certain man had two sons; and he came to the first, and said, Son, go work to day in my vineyard. |
    |