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 essentially a germ, either of good or evil.  And he is not like the seed of a plant, in whose development the tether allows no wider range than that between the more or less successful manifestation of its inherent nature.  Give a young tree fair play, good soil and abundant air,—­tend it carefully, in short, and you will have a noble tree.  Treat the young tree unfairly,—­give it a bad soil, deprive it of needful air and light, and it will grow up a stunted and poor tree.  But in the case of the human being, there is more than this difference in degree.  There may be a difference in kind.  The human being may grow up to be, as it were, a fair and healthful fruit-tree, or to be a poisonous one.  There is something positively awful about the potentialities that are in human nature.  The Archbishop of Canterbury might have grown up under influences which would have made him a bloodthirsty pirate or a sneaking pickpocket.  The pirate or the pickpocket, taken at the right time, and trained in the right way, might have been made a pious, exemplary man.  You remember that good divine, two hundred years since, who, standing in the market-place of a certain town, and seeing a poor wretch led by him to the gallows, said, “There goes myself, but for the grace of God.”  Of course, it is needful that human laws should hold all men as equally responsible.  The punishment of such an offence is such an infliction, no matter who committed the offence.  At least the mitigating circumstances which human laws can take into account must be all of a very plain and intelligible character.  It would not do to recognize anything like a graduated scale of responsibility.  A very bad training in youth would be in a certain limited sense regarded as lessening the guilt of any wrong thing done; and you may remember, accordingly, how that magnanimous monarch, Charles II., urged to the Scotch lords, in extenuation of the wrong things he had done, that his father had given him a very bad education.  But though human laws and judges may vainly and clumsily endeavor to fix each wrongdoer’s place in the scale of responsibility, and though they must, in a rough way, do what is rough justice in five cases out of six, still we may well believe that in the view of the Supreme Judge the responsibilities of men are most delicately graduated to their opportunities.