with you, if as the children of God's mercy and providence you wear the yoke of obedience to the will of your Father in heavenif, like Jesus, you strive to do, not your own will, but your Father's will-if like Him you put forth a brave trust in providence-if like Him you grapple with the trials, and toils, and duties of life, as the ordained instruments of spiritual strength and perfection -if like Him, though you could " call down legions of angels," you go calmly to the dungeon, rather than give again blow for blow, or railing for railing, or "controlment for controlment," heaven will be around you, for the heaven of love and trust will be within you. Wear this yoke. Yes, wear it. And the promise is, "you shall find rest unto your souls." Rest then is the reward of wearing it. And what a blessing and what a reward it is! Ask the sick man what it is? Ask the thoughtworn scholar, who has toiled till his brain has become hot and his pulse fluttering, what it is? Ask the seaman battling for his life with winds and waves, and the terrible phantoms of death striding along the boiling waters, what it is? Ask the conscience-haunted man-the man around whom the ghosts of remembered wrongs glide awfully silent, ask him what it is? Ah! it is rest-rest the sick man wants--the seaman wants-the sinner wants. It is rest we all want; rest from toil, rest from sin, rest from temptation, rest from the wrongs and evils of others. It is the cry of the human, We are weary! We are burdened! We are unhappy! Rest! Rest! Rest! We want rest! And it is, and it will be the cry of the human, ringing and reëchoing for ever through all realms and through all ages, until it is found in God and obedience to His will. "Bear this yoke," ye youth, "for a while, when you are young, that you may be free when you are old, that you may walk through life unmanacled by passions, unchained by lusts, spurning the lash of Satan, and deriding the bondage of sin, that you may come to that holy and happy land where no yoke is borne, where the souls of just men are illumined with amazing glory, and compassed round about by the holiness of God." In the language of Gilfillan, in his Third Gallery of Portraits, "Almost all the powers and elements of nature, combine in teaching man the one great simple word, 'bend.' Bend!' the winds say it to the tall pines, and they gain the curve of their magnificence by obeying. Bend,' gravitation says it to the earth, as she sweeps in her course round the sun, and she knows the whisper of his ruler, and stoops and bows before the skyey blaze. 'Bend,' the proud portals of human knowledge say it to all aspirants; and were it the brow of a Bacon or a Newton, it must in reverence bow. Bend,' the doors, the ancient doors of heaven say it in the music of their golden hinges, to all who would pass therein. And the Son of Man Himself, although he could have prayed to

* Sidney Smith.

His Father, and presently obtained twelve legions of angels, had to learn obedience, to suffer, to bow the head, ere as a king of glory He entered in. Trust thyself.' No! Christianity says, mistrust thyself-trust God. Do thy humble duty, and call the while on the lofty help that is above thee." May God bless you Christ's yoke which is

all, young men,* and help you to wear easy, and to bear his burden which is

light.

SERMON DCXCVII.

BY REV. JOSEPH MCKEE,

NEW YORK.

THE LAW OF INFLUENCES.†

"Am I my brother's keeper ?"-GENESIS iv. 9.

MAN is a social being. An isolated state is an unnatural state. The life of the solitary and the hermit is a moral solecism in the history of society. We are bound to each other by many a mystic tie. Sever but one of these ties and the soul is unhappy. We can hardly conceive of a more pitiable object, than that of a man who feels himself an outcast from the sympathies and regards of his fellow-men-an outlaw from the love of God and the friendship of men. It is not good for man to be alone. God hath made his human children brethren. He hath made every man his brother's keeper. This is a most cheering and consolatory fact in the moral organization of society, but it is also a fact of the most impressive character. This relationship of soul to soul and heart to heart does involve responsibilities and issues, awing and deep as the depths of eternity.

The moral constitution of man and of human society most impressively tells us, that God will not hold him guiltless who worketh injury or hurt to his brother, for though the earth may hide and cover up that wrong, that injury, that evil deed-be it what it may-hide in the deepest depths of secresy every mark of that deed, yet is there an eye that looketh ever into that man's face, and a voice that ever calls to him, "Where is thy brother what hast thou done unto him?" His sin finds him out. It drags him a guilty, fear-haunted man before the tribunal of immutable and eternal justice. We may not and cannot evade the corresponding obligations, which the moral and social relations that bind us to each other, do impose upon us.

* Preached before the young men of Rev. Dr. Scott's Church, Newark, Nov. 18, 1855. + Preached in the Allen-street Presbyterian Church, New York, Jan. 30, 1848.

In the struggle of life, the august Ruler and Judge of human actions has linked the great army of humanity shoulder to shoulder, and rank to rank, by mutual helps and mutual wants, so teaching us we should be mutually useful and helpful to each other.

And either helpful or harmful we are. No one stands so completely alone as to be without power over others for good or for bad. And no one stands so far removed from the influence of others, as to receive neither benefit nor injury from their influences over himself. We cannot live without influencing others, and others influencing us. Human society is a vast network of reciprocal influences. Every body acts, and is acted upon in turn. Every man helps to mould and fashion the character and destiny of every other man within the sphere of his attractions. It is this power of action and reaction-this reciprocity of moral influences that makes every man, to some extent, his brother's keeper.

I am not made a ruler and an overseer over my brother's household, or over his business. I am not responsible for the preservation of his health, or the integrity of his estate. These must depend upon himself, and on the great general laws over which I have no control. I have nothing to do with them. But I am responsible for the influence I may exercise over the health of his soul of making or marring his condition in that vast and solemn future that lies in its awful stillness before us. I am responsible for the good or bad I have taught him, by my example, my conversation, and my daily walk and life. I am responsible too, for whatever of evil in his person, character, or estate, he may have suffered directly or indirectly from me, through the instrumentality of others.

I shall endeavor to unfold these views of human relationship and responsibility.

I. And first: I remark that this law of spiritual influences-this reciprocity of action and reaction in the moral world is universal. It is an admitted law in the psychology of our spiritual nature, as certain and invariable in its workings as the laws of matter and motion in the material world. Every effort of the mind we put forth has in it an energy which may be felt by other minds, numbers without number, reproducing itself in endless and ever widening circles of action.

There is a moulding process going forward in churches, in families, in schools, in all the busy places of trade and commerce, in the very streets-a play of moral affinities between mind and mind, and heart and heart, invisible, it is true, as the affinities that preside over chemical changes and phenomena, but equally sure in working out its legitimate results. When I throw a stone into a quiet lake, it produces a series of concentric circles, widening

as they depart from the centre, until the disturbing force seems lost or spent by the resistance of the water. But when I can no longer detect these circles, is that force spent or annihilated? No such thing. Feeble as it seems, it goes on and on to increase the momentum of the waters of the lake. This is intelligibly and plainly illustrated by that law in physics, entitled the hydrostatic paradox, according to which, any force, however small, impressed upon any confined mass of water, however large, is communicated to every drop in that entire mass, each acting and reacting on each until the whole is in motion. You lay your hand on ocean. Its pressure affects every drop of that world of waters. You wave your hand in the air-that motion disturbs the entire atmospheric mass. True, you are not conscious it is so. You cannot see these wavelets or circles. They are no objects of your senses, but where the senses fail to aid you, you can bring the higher instruments of analysis and enquiry to their assistance--instruments which exhibit to us results both wonderful and impressive... A distinguished savant in making experiments on the Lake of Geneva, for telegraphic purposes, found that the blow of the hammer of a bell, struck under water, put in motion the entire water of the Lake, a weight equivalent to three hundred thousand millions of pounds of water, every drop of which moved in its turn-each acting and reacting on the other, and that too with an energy sufficient to affect a thin iron plate connected with his instrument, on the other side of the lake, a distance of twenty-/ seven miles, and so as to cause it to sound.

Indeed, if the doctrine of permanent impressions, as expounded by the author of the Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, be true, every impulse communicated by a man's hand to the ocean, or the earth; nay, every undulation of the air, occasioned even by his voice, produces a succession of waves which nothing short of the annihilation of matter can stop.

Now, we say a similar law obtains in the statics of the soul. Every man's moral nature presses on every other man's moral | nature with a definite intensity. Our actions and influence are not confined simply to those immediately around us. They travel on to infinity. They affect others we have never seenothers who are to live long after we are dead and forgotten by the living.

The liberty, laws, and institutions of this country, are, for example, the results of the thoughts and lives of men we have never seen. We inherit their thoughts. We are what they have made us as a nation. The same too may be said of the youth of a family, of a school, and of a neighborhood. Their characters, attainments, and conduct are, to a large extent, the worked-out results of the companions and circumstances with which they are surrounded. And what is true in this limited case is true the world over. The words spoken by a man in a public lecture room or

the newspaper paragraph he indites, may affect hundreds of minds in China, in India, in Africa, or the Isles of the Sea. It may set in train a series of actions that will travel on, and on, and on, for ever! It is this that invests a man's actions and character with a significance both awing and limitless. This truth, indeed, sometimes stands out before the world's eye in gigantic proportions. Every age produces some master mind--some man "in shape and gesture proudly eminent," influencing for good or evil the destinies of millions of his race. Moses for example was one of these men.

And when the imagination stretches itself away back into the shadows of the past, that venerable sage, standing with his rod by the rock of Horeb, or coming down the rugged steeps of Sinai to the congregated hosts of Israel, amid the awful thunderings and lightnings, and the still more awful trumpet voices that accompanied the delivery of the moral law-that venerable sage is the most commanding figure which the past presents to the mind's eye-a prophet, a warrior, a poet, a legislator-the only man of all our race that talked with God, as friend talks with friend-a teacher of religion, who though dead, still speaks to us of chaos, and creation, and the world wide flood, that swept away the elder brothers of our race.

Hume was another of those men that have "towered with Atlantæn shoulders" far above their fellows. But he stood among them as the fabled Java tree, beneath whose shadow no creature can live, and round and about which the bones of the dead lie bleaching in the sun-light. Those irreligious trains of thought he set in motion, are drifting, and will drift for ever, through thousands of minds in many lands, peopling them with spectred doubts and deep fixed scepticism. The man may die out of the memory of men, but the trains of thought he has originated and set in action, possess a vitality and a momentum coördinate with his being. And every man is, in his place, a Hume or a Moses to some other man--a guide to the better world, or the moral Upas-the poisoner and the destroyer of the spiritual health and beauty of some other soul. It is true, the influence one man exerts over another man may not, and does not, always lie open to human observation. Still every man is as a city set upon a hill. He will be observed. He will be imitated by some subaltern or other in the school of good or bad morals. He will model some other mind. He will give to some other mind its peculiar moral physiognomy. And whether we can mark that moulding process or not, it does not escape the burning search of the Omniscient, in adjusting the moral value of the lives of

each.

II. The good or the evil a man does lives after him. Each individual, living, self-conscious soul is a centre of moral power, a radiator of spiritual forces, either good or bad; for nothing is