It would be a very curious, and I doubt not a very alarming spectacle, if we could all of us see how very much we have done in the course of our lives by unconscious influence. But this is what history and biography never reveal. They tell us of enterprises taken in hand, battles fought, good causes advocated and won, in short, of every stir and movement made in the world. But of that subtle reciprocal leavening of human characters by one another of which we are speaking, because it is so noiselessly effected, they take no account. Yet secret and silent as it is, this involuntary influence is infinitely more powerful than the voluntary. Just so some of the most powerful agents in Nature are the quietest—do not thunder upon the ear or flash upon the eye. Gravitation is a tremendous force, operating all around us, and binding the planets to the Sun. Yet Gravitation is perfectly noiseless. {14} You would consider, I suppose, that the ends of an Institution like this were fully answered, and then only _fully_ answered, if the shadow of St. Peter’s Home were, in the high sense of the word, a _healing_ shadow—if the moral and spiritual influence exercised by the Sisters upon the patients were such that souls were won by it to Our Lord. And I can quite conceive that this might be so under the proper conditions. True; the period for which each patient may reside in the Home is but short. But then three or four weeks’ association with devoted servants of Christ, whose devotion transpires naturally and is not obtrusively put forward, may, under His Grace, work a great change, and leave an impression which will never be erased. Even the shadow of Peter passing by is sometimes effectual to a spiritual cure. If the fire of God’s Grace is burning bright and clear upon the altar of our hearts, it will throw out sparks in our passage through life. And it is in the nature of sparks to kindle, when they light on combustible material. Every soul with which we come in contact is sympathetic, and accessible at all times through its sensibilities. And its sympathies and sensibilities become greater oftentimes in the hour of weakness and necessary withdrawal from the world. Persons come to your Home to convalesce. They are not in bodily pain; for their cure is supposed to be already effected in the Hospital. Their hearts are in some measure predisposed to gratitude by a sense of God’s goodness in restoring them, and of your kindness in receiving them under your roof. Hence you have a very fair field for the exertion of Christian influence. And I can well conceive that many might derive a lasting benefit from association with you; and that looking back upon their past lives in advanced age they might say: “The first impressions I had of the reality of things unseen, and of the powers of the world to come, was given me at St. Peter’s Home, not so much by any definite teaching I carried away, as by the whole conduct and way of life of the Sisters.