ies, our influence. We have no
choice in the matter; we cannot evade or avoid it; and there is no more
possibility of our limiting it, or even tracing its limits, than there is
of setting a bound to the far-vibrating sound-waves, or watching their
flow through the invisible air. Not one sentence that passes these lips
of ours but must be an invisibly prolonged influence, not dying away into
silence, but living away into the words and deeds of others. The thought
would not be quite so oppressive if we could know what we have done and
shall be continuing to do by what we have said. But we _never_ can, as a
matter of fact. We may trace it a little way, and get a glimpse of some
results for good or evil; but we never can see any more of it than we can
see of a shooting star flashing through the night with a momentary
revelation of one step of its strange path. Even if the next instant
plunges it into apparent annihilation as it strikes the atmosphere of the
earth, we know that it is not really so, but that its mysterious material
and force must be added to the complicated materials and forces with
which it has come in contact, with a modifying power none the less real
because it is beyond our ken. And this is not comparing a great thing
with a small, but a small thing with a great. For what is material force
compared with moral force? what are gases, and vapours, and elements,
compared with souls and the eternity for which they are preparing?

We all know that there is influence exerted by a person's mere presence,
without the utterance of a single word. We are conscious of this every
day. People seem to carry an atmosphere with them, which _must_ be
breathed by those whom they approach. Some carry an atmosphere in which
all unkind thoughts shrivel up and cannot grow into expression. Others
carry one in which 'thoughts of Christ and things divine' never seem able
to flourish. Have you not felt how a happy conversation about the things
we love best is checked, or even strangled, by the entrance of one who is
not in sympathy? Outsiders have not a chance of ever really knowing what
delightful intercourse we have one with another about these things,
because their very presence chills and changes it. On the other hand, how
another person's incoming freshens and develops it and warms us all up,
and seems to give us, without the least conscious effort, a sort of
_lift!_

If even unconscious and involuntary influence is such a powe