and lives. A distinguished French preacher, of the Reformed faith, has a striking discourse on what he entitles the _solidarity_ of evil; and he too dilates upon the mysterious links which connect together persons and acts that appear to have nothing in common,—suggesting melancholy examples of the contagion of guilt and its consequences, of the expansive power of corruption and its almost boundless results. Our most powerful female writer of fiction has emphatically taught, if a striking story can teach, that there is no sort of wrong deed of which a man can bear the punishment alone; you can’t isolate yourself, and say that the evil which is in you shall not spread. Men’s lives are as thoroughly blended with each other as the air they breathe; evil spreads as necessarily as disease. “I know, I feel the terrible extent of suffering this sin of Arthur’s has caused to others,”—so the good rector tells one who cherishes vengeance on the wrong-doer; “but so does every sin cause suffering to others besides those who commit it.” The problem how far a man is to be held responsible for the unforeseen consequences of his own deed this speaker pronounces to be one that might well make us tremble to look into it; the evil consequences that may lie folded in a single act of selfish indulgence being a thought so awful that it ought surely to awaken some feeling less presumptuous than a rash and vindictive desire to punish. In another of her books the same authoress takes pains to prove how deeply inherent it is in this life of ours that men have to suffer for each other’s sins; so inevitably diffusive is human suffering that we can conceive no retribution which does not spread beyond its mark in pulsations of unmerited pain. There is a passage in one of Madame de Charrière’s letters in which, avowing her full recognition of the fact that she must pay in person for the costly experience of life, she expresses the futile wish that others might not have to share in the costs, but owns with a sigh that the wish _is_ futile, for one does nothing absolutely alone she says, and nothing so happens to us as to entirely exclude the participation of others: “_On ne fait rien tout seul, et il ne nous arrive rien à nous seuls._” We are taught by modern science that the slightest movement, of the smallest body, in the remotest region, produces results which are perpetual, which diffuse themselves through all space, and which, though they may be metamorphosed, cannot be destroyed.[1] Or again, as Mrs. Browning reminds us,— “Each creature holds an insular point in space: Yet what man stirs a finger, breathes a sound, But all the multitudinous beings round, In all the countless worlds, with time and place For their conditions, down to the central base, Thrill, haply, in vibration and rebound, Life answering life across the vast profound, In full antiphony....”