And this is a healthy and praiseworthy feeling. It would indeed be a bad
sign if such a feeling were wanting or weak in any society.

But I am not sure that we keep it before us--all of us--as clearly as we
ought to do, that this reputation of the society is simply the outcome of
our separate lives and habits.

The reputation is the reflex of the life; hardly ever, perhaps, an exact
reflex, very often a distorted reflex with this or that feature
exaggerated; but yet always a reflex.

The reputation you bear is the impression made by your common life on the
minds of those who see it from the outside, or who hear men's talk about
it.

And we do well to be sensitive on such a subject; but we do still better
if we bear in mind that this common life is what comes out of our own
life, and is the result of its contact with that of our neighbour.

And with this thought in our minds we feel how searching and how directly
personal is this primitive and childlike question, Who can bring a clean
thing out of an unclean?

Societies, especially young societies, are very impressible, and their
character--the quality, that is, of their life--is fixed by prevailing
influences, which show themselves in fashions, habits, and tendencies, in
the common types of thought, or taste, or behaviour, or conduct.

This is obvious enough to every one; but what we do not seem always to