ly course, in the family and in the outer world, from
youth to age, is, in fact, a sower scattering these germs of good or evil
unceasingly. We know, also, that when they are once scattered they
cannot be gathered up again. They are yours to scatter--these seeds that
you are adding to the common life--and you are responsible for the fruit
they bear; but having sown them, you are powerless afterwards to prevent
them from bearing fruit after their kind in other lives. Once launched
in the air around you, they spread their contagion of evil or their
stimulus to good, their savour of life or death.

The mere suspicion of this undefined power over other lives which is
inherent in our own life should surely make us very careful about it.

It gives a new sense of personal responsibility; it lays its hand upon us
to check us in any vice, or folly, or sin; and it is a stimulus to every
virtue and to all good purposes.

But the thing which of all others it is perhaps of most importance for us
to remember about it is that this stream of our personal influence which
flows out of our life is a double stream. It is of two kinds. One part
of it flows unconsciously, whether we think of it or not; it streams out
from our personality as sunlight from the sun.

The other is that which we exercise by some conscious effort of the will,
and with some deliberate purpose or intention.

Now, in the case of most of us, this tide of unconscious influence
flowing from us without any deliberate or set purpose on our part, our
involuntary contribution to the common life, is far more powerful for
good or for evil than anything which we ever do by way of active purpose
to influence another's life, and this because our unconscious influence
is the reflex on the outer world of what we are in ourselves; it is the
projection, or shall we say the radiation, of our own life, its tastes,
tempers, habits, and character, upon the lives around us.

What we do or intend to do, what influence we endeavour to exercise, is
very likely to be at the best intermittent, but this door of involuntary
communication between every man's life and his neighbour's life is always
standing open; and so it comes about that your life, whether public or
private, is of more importance to others than anything else about you.

At a time when so many things contribute to fix men's thoughts on
externals, and we are all tempted to think more about our work than about
our life,