All human intercourse is a seeing of reflections.  I meet a stranger in a railway carriage.  The cadence of his first words tells me he is English and comes from Yorkshire.  Without knowing it he has reflected his birthplace, his parents, and the long history of their race.  Even physiologically he is a mirror.  His second sentence records that he is a politician, and a faint inflection in the way he pronounces The Times reveals his party.  In his next remarks I see reflected a whole world of experiences.  The books he has read, the people he has met, the companions he keeps, the influences that have played upon him and made him the man he is—­these are all registered there by a pen which lets nothing pass, and whose writing can

          NEVER BE BLOTTED OUT.

What I am reading in him meantime he also is reading in me; and before the journey is over we could half write each other’s lives.  Whether we like it or not, we live in glass houses.  The mind, the memory, the soul, is simply a vast chamber panelled with looking-glass.  And upon this miraculous arrangement and endowment depends the capacity of mortal souls to “reflect the character of the Lord.”

(2).  But this is not all.  If all these varied reflections from our so-called secret life are patent to the world, how close the writing, complete the record within the soul itself!  For the influences we meet are not simply held for a moment on the polished surface and thrown off again into space.  Each is retained where first it fell, and stored up in the soul forever.

          THIS LAW OF ASSIMILATION

is the second, and by far the most impressive truth which underlies the formula of sanctification—­the truth that men are not only mirrors, but that these mirrors, so far from being mere reflectors of the fleeting things they see, transfer into their own inmost substance, and hold in permanent preservation the things that they reflect.

No one knows how the soul can hold these things.  No one knows how the miracle is done.  No phenomenon in nature, no process in chemistry, no chapter in necromancy can ever help us to begin to understand this amazing operation.  For, think of it, the past is not only focused there, in a man’s soul, it is there.  How could it be reflected from there if it were not there?  All things that he has ever seen, known, felt, believed of the surrounding world are now within him, have become part of him, in part are him—­he has been changed into their image.  He may deny it, he may resent it, but they are there.  They do not adhere to him, they are transfused through him.  He cannot alter or rub them out.  They are not in his memory, they are in him.  His soul is as they have filled it, made it, left it.  These things, these books, these events, these influences are his makers.  In their hands are life and death, beauty and deformity.  When once the image or likeness of any of these is fairly presented to the soul, no power on earth can hinder two things happening—­it must be absorbed into the soul and forever reflected back again from character.