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In the struggle of life, the august Ruler and Judge of human actions has linked the great army of humanity shoulder to shoulder, and rank to rank, by mutual helps and mutual wants, so teaching us we should be mutually useful and helpful to each other.

And either helpful or harmful we are. No one stands so completely alone as to be without power over others for good or for bad. And no one stands so far removed from the influence of others, as to receive neither benefit nor injury from their influences over himself. We cannot live without influencing others, and others influencing us. Human society is a vast network of reciprocal influences. Every body acts, and is acted upon in turn. Every man helps to mould and fashion the character and destiny of every other man within the sphere of his attractions. It is this power of action and reaction-this reciprocity of moral influences that makes every man, to some extent, his brother's keeper.

I am not made a ruler and an overseer over my brother's household, or over his business. I am not responsible for the preservation of his health, or the integrity of his estate. These must depend upon himself, and on the great general laws over which I have no control. I have nothing to do with them. But I am responsible for the influence I may exercise over the health of his soul of making or marring his condition in that vast and solemn future that lies in its awful stillness before us. I am responsible for the good or bad I have taught him, by my example, my conversation, and my daily walk and life. I am responsible too, for whatever of evil in his person, character, or estate, he may have suffered directly or indirectly from me, through the instrumentality of others.

I shall endeavor to unfold these views of human relationship and responsibility.

I. And first: I remark that this law of spiritual influencesthis reciprocity of action and reaction in the moral world is universal. It is an admitted law in the psychology of our spiritual nature, as certain and invariable in its workings as the laws of matter and motion in the material world. Every effort of the mind we put forth has in it an energy which may be felt by other minds, numbers without number, reproducing itself in endless and ever widening circles of action.

There is a moulding process going forward in churches, in families, in schools, in all the busy places of trade and commerce, in the very streets-a play of moral affinities between mind and mind, and heart and heart, invisible, it is true, as the affinities that preside over chemical changes and phenomena, but equally sure in working out its legitimate results. When I throw a stone into a quiet lake, it produces a series of concentric circles, widening

as they depart from the centre, until the disturbing force seems lost or spent by the resistance of the water. But when I can no longer detect these circles, is that force spent or annihilated? No such thing. Feeble as it seems, it goes on and on to increase the momentum of the waters of the lake. This is intelligibly and plainly illustrated by that law in physics, entitled the hydrostatic paradox, according to which, any force, however small, impressed upon any confined mass of water, however large, is communicated to every drop in that entire mass, each acting and reacting on each until the whole is in motion. You lay your hand on ocean. Its pressure affects every drop of that world of waters. You wave your hand in the air-that motion disturbs the entire atmospheric mass. True, you are not conscious it is so. You cannot see these wavelets or circles. They are no objects of your senses, but where the senses fail to aid you, you can bring the higher instruments of analysis and enquiry to their assistance-instruments which exhibit to us results both wonderful and impressive. A distinguished savant in making experiments on the Lake of Geneva, for telegraphic purposes, found that the blow of the hammer of a bell, struck under water, put in motion the entire water of the Lake, a weight equivalent to three hundred thousand millions of pounds of water, every drop of which moved in its turn--each acting and reacting on the other, and that too with án energy sufficient to affect a thin iron plate connected with his instrument, on the other side of the lake, a distance of twentyseven miles, and so as to cause it to sound.

Indeed, if the doctrine of permanent impressions, as expounded by the author of the Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, be true, every impulse communicated by a man's hand to the ocean, or the earth; nay, every undulation of the air, occasioned even by his voice, produces a succession of waves which nothing short of the annihilation of matter can stop.

Now, we say a similar law obtains in the statics of the soul. Every man's moral nature presses on every other man's moral nature with a definite intensity. Our actions and influence are not confined simply to those immediately around us. They travel on to infinity. They affect others we have never seenothers who are to live long after we are dead and forgotten by the living.

The liberty, laws, and institutions of this country, are, for example, the results of the thoughts and lives of men we have never seen. We inherit their thoughts. We are what they have made us as a nation. The same too may be said of the youth of a family, of a school, and of a neighborhood. Their characters, attainments, and conduct are, to a large extent, the worked-out results of the companions and circumstances with which they are surrounded. And what is true in this limited case is true the world over. The words spoken by a man in a public lecture room or

the newspaper paragraph he indites, may affect hundreds of minds in China, in India, in Africa, or the Isles of the Sea. It may set in train a series of actions that will travel on, and on, and on, for ever! It is this that invests a man's actions and character with a significance both awing and limitless. This truth, indeed, sometimes stands out before the world's eye in gigantic proportions. Every age produces some master mind-some man "in shape and gesture proudly eminent," influencing for good or evil the destinies of millions of his race. Moses for example was one of these men.

And when the imagination stretches itself away back into the shadows of the past, that venerable sage, standing with his rod by the rock of Horeb, or coming down the rugged steeps of Sinai to the congregated hosts of Israel, amid the awful thunderings and lightnings, and the still more awful trumpet voices that accompanied the delivery of the moral law-that venerable sage is the most commanding figure which the past presents to the mind's eye-a prophet, a warrior, a poet, a legislator-the only man of all our race that talked with God, as friend talks with friend-a teacher of religion, who though dead, still speaks to us of chaos, and creation, and the world wide flood, that swept away the elder brothers of our race.

Hume was another of those men that have "towered with Atlantæn shoulders" far above their fellows. But he stood among them as the fabled Java tree, beneath whose shadow no creature can live, and round and about which the bones of the dead lie bleaching in the sun-light. Those irreligious trains of thought he set in motion, are drifting, and will drift for ever, through thousands of minds in many lands, peopling them with spectred doubts and deep fixed scepticism. The man may die out of the memory of men, but the trains of thought he has originated and set in action, possess a vitality and a momentum coördinate with his being. And every man is, in his place, a Hume or a Moses to some other man--a guide to the better world, or the moral Upas-the poisoner and the destroyer of the spiritual health and beauty of some other soul. It is true, the influence one man exerts over another man may not, and does not, always lie open to human observation. Still every man is as a city set upon a hill. He will be observed. He will be imitated by some subaltern or other in the school of good or bad morals. He will model some other mind. He will give to some other mind its peculiar moral physiognomy. And whether we can mark that moulding process or not, it does not escape the burning search of the Omniscient, in adjusting the moral value of the lives of

each.

II. The good or the evil a man does lives after him. Each individual, living, self-conscious soul is a centre of moral power, a radiator of spiritual forces, either good or bad; for nothing is

neutral, nothing indifferent, or trivial, which helps to fashion souls and takes hold on the vitalities of our inner life, and thought, and feeling. Go where we may; do what we will; assume whatever style and stamp of character we choose: place ourselves in every possible social condition, high or low, rich or poor, we do throw off from us, and draw after us, and receive upon ourselves in return, trains of influences, which are infinite in their number and consequences, influences which mould and modify character, and therefore determine immortal destinies. The outworked results of this law we cannot estimate now, either with respect to ourselves or others. Not until the day of the revelation of all secret and hidden things, shall we know the full amount of good or evil, which had its starting point in the moral workings of our own lives, or of the lives of those who made with us the journey of life. We have no means of analysis or observation, by which we can solve the problem.

Now the workings of this law of mutual influences, we cannot evade, because such is the moral and social constitution of our nature. The human soul is so plastic, its susceptibilities so delicate, its sympathies so subtle and acute, that one mind cannot come in contact with another mind, without both giving and receiving influences of some sort or another.

We cannot be thrown into the society of our fellow-men by the calls of business or pleasure; we cannot be united to them by the ties of kindred, and family, and friendship, without leaving our moral mark after us-the godlikeness we have caught by reflection from the life of our Saviour, or the dark shadows and stains which sin, and pride, and passion, have cast upon our moral

nature.

This machinery of moral causes, ever in active and unceasing play in forming character, is truly inexplicable and wonderful. The very thoughts that are now rising up and struggling for expression in my own mind-the thoughts, too, that are rising up and drifting through your minds now, in your seats, as you sit here, all calm and unexcited, may produce the most important results on other minds in other ages. Like those rivers that sometimes sink and disappear, running for a time in concealed and under-ground channels, gathering force as they go, and then gush up to the sunlight again in irrepressible fountains of living water, scattering themselves in a thousand directions over fields far away from the place where they disappeared; so may our thoughts and doings this day, and all the days of our lives run under ground, as it were, and come flashing up after long intervals in multiplied and manifold forms of virtue or vice, of beauty or deformity, of worship or impiety.

For example. If under the impulse of a holy and generous thought you do this day make the resolve to live a better and more consistent Christian life, and if you do actually express that

resolution in action, by repressing the uprisings of anger, pride, passion, and every form of sin. If you chasten your spirit into obedience. If you mould your life and conduct after the divine model of the Lord Jesus Christ, then you will set in action through your family and through your neighborhood, unacknowledged it may be, and undiscoverable by human eyes, but spread you will, the vital forces of a godly and spiritual life-forces that are destined to make the pulses of many a soul to beat hopefully and happily with the excitement of devout thoughts; này, more, that shall make some other soul the spring and source of blessed influences to others, onwards and around, in an endless progression of usefulness and goodness.

You cannot live and die a good man, even in the lowliest and humblest walks of human life, without leaving your moral likeness struck into the memory of some one, who has seen and recognized in you, the beauty and divinity of goodness. Your example shall wake up the aspirations of some other soul, and that shall move another, and that other one shall send the accumulated moral movement on, and on, and on, to some other soul, what soul you know not, I know not. It may be the strong athletic soul of a second Washington, or the earnest and dreamy spirit of some future Bunyan, or the mighty and majestic mind of another Milton, speaking as with the tongue of an Archangel, of chaos, and night, and creation; of man, and sin, and redemption, until he commands the audience and the homage of all nations and of all times. Yes, those very mental and moral characteristics of your life to-morrow, originated and produced by your to-day resolves, may run along the nerves and tissues of a hundred generations, and, for aught you know to the contrary, be worked up into the moral texture of another Washington, or a Bunyan, or a Milton, or a Voltaire, or a Danton, or a Napoleon, or a Robespierre.

My hearers, we are all too inconsiderate here. We think too lightly of our own individual personal influences on each other. The greatly good, the awfully wicked and profane, the powerful, the learned, the wise, the mighty, the rich, we say have influence. But we, we are too weak, too insignificant, too busy, while we go the daily round of our obscure and common lives to do either much good or much harm to our fellow men. Our faults and follies will die with us, and our virtues, if we have any, will soon perish out of the history of the race. But it is not so. Each does act alone, and by himself, and powerfully too, in modifying the lives and characters of others. We have, indeed, of late put so much confidence in collected associated efforts for the good of mankind-so accustomed ourselves to the heavy machinery of social benevolent movement in the church and elsewhere, that we have come to regard this, as the only lever by which the moral world is to be moved. This is a gigantic error. We all know that the most vigorous public efforts in the direction of virtue and

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