Action, Universal
God designed man for active, purposeful living, not passive existence.
Man was not made to live merely for the possible reception of external impressions, a harp upon which every fitful wind might blow; he was made to act, to will, to influence, to become a power, and the living centre of ever-radiating impressions. It were strange, indeed, if, in a laborious universe, man should be the only idler among the works of the Creator's hands. While all around are working, from the wavelet's tiniest ripple, and from the rosebud's heart, ever glowing into deeper crimson, to the tireless ocean, and the menial and monarch sun; whilst unwearied labor was the condition of Paradise, and angels cease not in their ministry, and there is no faltering in the march of the heavens, and the Son went about doing good, and the Eternal Father, the Watchman of Israel, neither slumbereth nor sleepeth, you will not wonder that, by a law as benign as it is authoritative, God has impressed activity upon his favorite creature, man, and has provided that his shall not be a zoophite existence, clinging in blind helplessness as a parasite to its guardian rock, but a life beautiful and holy, a life of quickened pulses, and an activity and an energy of which insensate matter knows not; and finding in the rapturous doing of every-day life its very soul and essence of joy. There is a necessity in man, then, for activity. Act he must and will; and it is the province of religion to direct and control this tendency, so that his doing may be according to that which is right.
— W. M. Punshon