Did you enjoy your breakfast this morning? You were all alone,
and got it yourself, did you say? Did you make the Irish linen
in your napkin, or were your table furnishings the creations
of an idle hour? Did you raise your own coffee? Did the melon
grow in your garden, or was the beef fattened in your pasture?
The very ends of the earth contributed to your simple meal, and
for it you were dependent upon people you had never seen. Your
breakfast-table was really a clearing-house for the ends of the
earth, so that when you redecorate your dining-room, and are
placing upon the walls the familiar legends, “Let good digestion
wait on appetite,” and that famous quatrain of Robert Burns:
Some hae meat but can not eat,
And some would eat that want it;
But we hae meat, and we can eat,
So let the Lord be thank it,
you might most appropriately add to these that thrilling
confession of Paul’s, “I am debtor both to the Greeks and
to the barbarians, both to the wise and to the unwise.”
(Text.)--NEHEMIAH BOYNTON.
(2142)
As the astronomers tell us that it is probable that there are
in the universe innumerable solar systems besides ours, to each
of which myriads of utterly unknown and unseen stars belong,
so it is certain that every man, however obscure, however far
removed from the general recognition, is one of a group of men
impressible for good, and impressible for evil, and that it is
in the eternal nature of things that he can not really improve
himself without in some degree improving other men.--CHARLES
DICKENS.
(2143)
See BOY AND KING.
=Mutuality=--See SOCIAL INTERDEPENDENCE; SOCIAL STRENGTH.
=Mutuality, True=--See FAITHFULNESS.