for this life or the other. Oh, how much may turn upon a
little thing! Because the railway train in which you were coming to a
certain place was stopped by a snowstorm, the whole character of your
life may have been changed. Because some one was in the drawing-room
when you went to see Miss Smith on a certain day, resolved to put to her
a certain question, you missed the tide, you lost your chance, you went
away to Australia and never saw her more. It fell upon a day that
a ship, coming from Melbourne, was weathering a rocky point on an
iron-bound coast, and was driven close upon that perilous shore. They
tried to put her about; it was the last chance. It was a moment of awful
risk and decision. If the wind catches the sails, now shivering as the
ship comes up, on the right side, then all on board are safe. If the
wind catches the sails on the other side, then all on board must perish.
And so it all depends upon which surface of certain square yards of
canvas the uncertain breeze shall strike, whether John Smith, who is
coming home from the diggings with twenty thousand pounds, shall go
down and never be heard of again by his poor mother and sisters away in
Scotland,--or whether he shall get safely back, a rich man, to gladden
their hearts, and buy a pretty little place, and improve the house on it
into the pleasantest picture, and purchase, and ride, and drive various
horses, and be seen on market-days sauntering in the High Street of the
county-town, and get married, and run about the lawn before his door,
chasing his little children, and become a decent elder of the Church,
and live quietly and happily for many years. Yes, from what precise
point of the compass the next flaw of wind should come would decide the
question between the long homely life in Scotland and a nameless burial
deep in a foreign sea.

It seems to me to be one of the main characteristics of human beings,
not that they actually are much, but that they are something of which
much may be made. There are untold potentialities in human nature. The
tree cut down, concerning which its heathen owner debated whether he
should make it into a god or into a three-legged stool, was positively
nothing in its capacity of coming to different ends and developments,
when we compare it with each human being born into this world. Man is
not so much a thing already, as he is the germ of something. He is,
so to speak, material formed to the hand of circumstances. He is