Page:The Responsibilities of the American Youth.pdf/6

6 responsibilities, can the former be justly exercised, and the latter honestly, truly and faithfully met and discharged.

And it is just to the want of this adjustment of the two, that all the commotion, confusion and distraction in the political and religious world owe their existence. A struggle going on between responsibility on the one hand and tyranny on the other, which now has assumed the name of conservatism—a fine name to conceal a hateful and repulsive thing! But you will always find this conservatism, as it calls itself—discover it where you may and under whatever name or association it lies—posted and trenched against every species of reform, improvement and progression; standing still like a mile-stone, and sneering at and ridiculing every thing that passes by in its flying career.

Human responsibility, my young friends, is a high and a sacred thing, and grows out of the nature and necessities of man, and is always determined by the condition of his nature and necessities. And as man changes, or as his condition and circumstances change, there will and must be a change in his responsibilities, his rights and his duties; and those who laugh at all progress in man and his condition, are either too stupid to perceive the great law of progression which God has imposed upon the universe and all its contents, or they are too lazy to put their intellectual and moral locomotives in motion; and thus they become the dignified mile-stones of the world—witnessing all that passes by, but without one feeling of the excitement, the joys, pleasures and interest that fill the traveler’s breast.

But there is one circumstance connected with the doctrine of responsibility which we must not fail to notice, which is this:—that men are much more desirous of securing their rights than of meeting and discharging the responsibilities which those rights impose upon them; upon the same principle that most men would rather receive a debt justly due them, than discharge a pecuniary obligation equally just. This results from the fact that it is more pleasant to receive than to give; though it is much more blessed to give than to receive; and this is the law or consideration that should influence all men in the discharge of their duties and responsibilities. Not that they should desire less the possession of all their rights, but the discharge of all their responsibilities more: