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.

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