[To be continued.]
[SUNDAY READINGS.]
Selected by Rev. J. H. VINCENT, D.D.
[Sunday, November 4.]
MORAL DISTINCTIONS NOT SUFFICIENTLY REGARDED IN SOCIAL INTERCOURSE.
“He that walketh with wise men shall be wise; but a companion of fools shall be destroyed.”—Proverbs xiii:20.
That “a man may be known by the company he keeps,” has passed into a proverb among all nations, thus attesting what has been the universal experience. The fact would seem to be that a man’s associates either find him, or make him like themselves. An acute but severe critic of manners, who was too often led by his disposition and circumstances to sink the philosopher in the satirist, has said: “Nothing is so contagious as example. Never was there any considerable good or ill action, that hath not produced its like. We imitate good ones through emulation; and bad ones through that malignity in our nature, which shame conceals, and example sets at liberty.”
This being the case, or anything like it, all, I think, must agree that moral distinctions are not sufficiently cared for in social intercourse. In forming our intimacies we are sometimes determined by the mere accident of being thrown together; sometimes by a view to connections and social position; sometimes by the fascination of what are called companionable qualities; seldom, I fear, by thoughtful and serious regard to the influence they are likely to have on character. We forget that other attractions, of whatsoever nature, instead of compensating for moral unfitness in a companion, only have the effect to make such unfitness the more to be dreaded.