UK 24:14{SA 145:11{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 nonetheless 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 vapors, and elements, compared with souls and the eternity for which they are preparing? 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.
A look of great affliction, as you tell what one told you,
With a feeble contradiction, or a "hope it is not true!”
Only a low, "I wonder!" Nothing unfair at all;
But the whisper grows to thunder, and a scathing bolt may fall;
And a good ship is dismasted, and hearts are like to break,
And a Christian life Is blasted, for a scarcely-guessed mistake!