Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,
A hero perish or a sparrow fall,
Atoms or systems into ruin hurled,
And now a bubble burst, and now a world.--Pope.
I have here quoted one of the grandest flights of the
human fancy, and with a purpose. If God, who is perfection, and in whose
image we are faintly formed, watches the weakliest of his lambs,
supports the weariest of his poor sparrows, should not we, in trying to
be true men, endeavor to pay equal care to all things intrusted to our
attention, be they great or be they small! And more than that. The
little errors beget myriads of their kind. "Many mickles make a muckle."
The habit sooner or later, leads some of us into an awful abyss, where
it had been better we had not lived. Errors creep into character just as
ideas get into our brain. Says Moore:
And how like forts, to which beleaguers win
Unhoped-for entrance through some friend within,
One clear idea, wakened in the breast
By memory's magic, lets in all the rest.
Says Franklin: "A little neglect may breed great mischief; for want of a
nail the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost; for want
of a horse the driver was lost; being overtaken and slain by an enemy,
all for the want of care about a horse-shoe nail." "In persons grafted
with a serious trust," says Shakspeare "negligence is a serious crime."
And so it is.