October 25

Making or marring other lives

“Let us therefore follow after the things . . . wherewith one may edify another” (Rom. 14:19).
“Let . . . no man put a stumblingblock or an occasion to fall in his brother’s way” (Rom. 14:13).

No human being can come into this world without increasing or diminishing the sum total of human happiness, not only of the present, but of every subsequent age of humanity. No one can detach himself from this connection. There is no sequestered spot in the universe, no dark niche along the disc of nonexistence to which he can retreat with his relations to others; where he can withdraw the influence of his existence upon the moral destiny of the world. Everywhere his presence or absence will be felt, everywhere he will have companions who will be better or worse for his influence.


It is an old saying, and one of fearful and fathomless import, that we are forming characters for eternity. Forming characters! Whose? Our own or others? Both, and in that momentous fact lies the peril and responsibility of our existence. Who is sufficient for such a thought? Thousands of my fellow-beings will yearly enter eternity with characters differing from those they would have carried thither, had I never lived. The sunlight of that world will reveal my finger marks in their formations, and in their successive strata of thought and life.

The smallest bark on life’s tumultuous ocean
Will leave a track behind forevermore;
The lightest wave of influence, once in motion,
Extends and widens to the eternal shore.
We should be wary, then, who go before
A myriad yet to be, and we should take
Our bearings carefully where breakers roar
And fearful tempests gather: one mistake
May wreck unnumbered barks that follow in our wake.
—Sarah Knowles Bolton.

It is a high, solemn and almost awful thought for every individual man that his earthly influence which has had a commencement will never, through all ages, were he the very meanest of us, have an end.
—T. Carlyle.

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