Character works with or without consent.  The selfish man fills his office with a malign atmosphere; his very presence chills like a cold, clammy day.  Suspicious people fill all the circle in which they live with envy and jealousy.  Moody men distribute gloom and depression; hopelessness drains off high spirits as cold iron draws the heat from the hand.  Domineering men provoke rebellion and breed endless irritations.

Great hearts there are also among men; they carry a volume of manhood; their presence is sunshine, their coming changes our climate; they oil the bearings of life; their shadow always falls behind them; they make right living easy.  Blessed are the happiness-makers!—­they represent the best forces in civilization.  They are to the heart and home what the honeysuckle is to the door over which it clings.  These embodied gospels interpret Christianity.  Jenny Lind explains a sheet of printed music—­and a royal Christian heart explains, and is more than a creed.  Little wonder, when Christianity is incarnated in a mother, that the youth worships her as though she were an angel.  Someone has likened a church full of people to a box of unlighted candles; latent light is there; if they were only kindled and set burning they would be lights indeed.  What God asks for is luminous Christians and living gospels.

Another form of influence continues after death, and may be called unconscious immortality or conserved social energy.  Personality is organized into instruments, tools, books, institutions.  Over these forms of activity death and years have no power for destroying.  The swift steamboat and the flying train tell us that Watt and Stephenson are still toiling for men.  Every foreign cablegram reminds us that Cyrus Field has just returned home.  The merchant who organizes a great business sends down to the generations his personality, prudence, wisdom and executive skill.  The names of inventors may now be on moldering tombstones, but their busy fingers are still weaving warm textures for the world’s poor.  The gardener of Hampton court, who, in old age, wished to do yet one more helpful deed, and planted with elms and oaks the roadway leading to the historic house, still lives in those columnar trees, and all the long summer through distributes comfort and refreshment.  Every man who opens up a roadway into the wilderness; every engineer throwing a bridge over icy rivers for weary travelers; every builder rearing abodes of peace, happiness and refinement for his generation; every smith forging honest plates that hold great ships in time of storm, every patriot that redeems his land with blood; every martyr forgotten and dying in his dungeon that freedom might never perish; every teacher and discoverer who has gone into lands of fever and miasma to carry liberty, intelligence and religion to the ignorant, still walks among men, working for society and is unconsciously immortal.