Oh, this marvellous, this awful power that we have over other people’s lives!  Oh! the power of the sin that you have done years and years ago!  It is awful to think of it.  I think there is hardly anything more terrible to the human thought than this—­the picture of a man who, having sinned years and years ago in a way that involved other souls in his sin, and then, having repented of his sin and undertaken another life, knows certainly that the power, the consequence of that sin is going on outside of his reach, beyond even his ken and knowledge.  He cannot touch it.  You wronged a soul ten years ago.  You taught a boy how to tell his first mercantile lie; you degraded the early standards of his youth.  What has become of that boy to-day?  You may have repented.  He has passed put of your sight.  He has gone years and years ago.  Somewhere in this great, multitudinous mass of humanity he is sinning and sinning and reduplicating and extending the sin that you did.  You touched the faith of some believing soul years ago with some miserable sneer of yours, with some cynical and sceptical disparagement of God and of the man who is the utterance of God upon the earth.  You taught the soul that was enthusiastic to be full of scepticisms and doubts.  You wronged a woman years ago, and her life has gone out from your life, you cannot begin to tell where.  You have repented of your sin.  You have bowed yourself, it may be, in dust and ashes.  You have entered upon a new life.  You are pure to-day.  But where is the sceptical soul?  Where is the ruined woman whom you sent forth into the world out of the shadow of your sin years ago?  You cannot touch that life.  You cannot reach it.  You do not know where it is.  No steps of yours, quickened with all your earnestness, can pursue it.  No contrition of yours can drawback its consequences.  Remorse cannot force the bullet back again into the gun from which it once has gone forth.  It makes life awful to the man who has ever sinned, who has ever wronged and hurt another life because of this sin, because no sin ever was done that did not hurt another life.  I know the mercy of our God, that while He has put us into each other’s power to a fearful extent, He never will let any soul absolutely go to everlasting ruin for another’s sin; and so I dare to see the love of God pursuing that lost soul where you cannot pursue it.  But that does not for one moment lift the shadow from your heart, or cease to make you tremble when you think of how your sin has outgrown itself and is running far, far away where you can never follow it.

Thank God the other thing is true as well.  Thank God that when a man does a bit of service, however little it may be, of that too he can never trace the consequences.  Thank God that that which in some better moment, in some nobler inspiration, you did ten years ago to make your brother’s faith a little more strong, to let your shop boy confirm and not doubt the confidence in man which he had brought