'Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap' There is no seed
which does not sprout in the harvest of the moral life. Every deed
germinates according to its kind. For all that a man does he has to
carry the consequences, and every one shall bear his own burden. 'If
thou doest not well,' it is not, as we fondly conceive it sometimes
to be, a mere passing deflection from the rule of right, which is
done and done with, but we have created, as out of our very own
substance, a witness against ourselves whose voice can never be
stifled. 'If thou doest not well' thy sin takes permanent form and
is fastened to thy door.

And then let me remind you, too, how the metaphor of our text is
confirmed by other obvious facts, on which I need but briefly dwell.
Putting aside all the remoter bearings of that thought of
responsibility, I suppose we all admit that we have consciences; I
suppose that we all know that we have memories; I suppose we all of
us have seen, in the cases of others, and have experienced for
ourselves, how deeds long done and long forgotten have an awful
power of rising again after many long years.

Be sure that your memory has in it everything that you ever did. A
landscape may be hidden by mists, but a puff of wind will clear them
away, and it will all lie there, visible to the furthest horizon.
There is no fact more certain than the extraordinary swiftness and
completeness with which, in certain circumstances of life, and often
very near the close of it, the whole panorama of the past may rise
again before a man, as if one lightning flash showed all the dreary
desolation that lay behind him. There have been men recovered from
drowning and the like, who have told us that, as in an instant,
there seemed unrolled before their startled eyes the whole scroll of