It may make an immense difference to all your thoughts about your common habits, and your standards of daily conduct and duty, if you remember this ancient saying, that no man can bring a clean thing out of an unclean. And so I have to ask you to consider a little how the common life of this society is dependent upon your life.
Every individual acts upon the life of the community around him as a power or influence in it. This seems so obvious when mentioned as hardly to deserve the mentioning, and yet in practice we are very apt to overlook it.
You and I, all of us, without any exception, are endowed with some share of this power.
In this respect, as in other ways, there is, of course, every possible difference in
degree between one and another, between the strong and the weak, between those who are conspicuous and those who are obscure; but there is no other difference.
Every one of you possesses some share of this mysterious, and undefined, and immeasurable gift of influencing his neighbour’s life. Every sin that may have a root in your heart is acting, though you may not think of it or intend it, as a pestilent influence outside your own life; every virtue you exercise may be causing similar virtues to take root and grow in some one near to you.
The tone of the society or life around you is, in fact, just the sum and expression of such individual influences as these.
We may not be able to trace all the various and multitudinous germs or seeds of such influence as they flow out from us in our daily round of common life; but we are conscious that each and every single soul, all through its earthly 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.