Apart from and beyond our direct effort to put the best into other lives is our _indirect_, our unconscious influence to this good end. Personality is more potent than words. Men and women impart ozone to the atmosphere without knowing what good they have done. They become standards of righteousness and are all unaware that any one looks at them to gauge his own opinion or shape his own conduct. They are like regulator clocks, by which the watches of the world seen to be wrong are set aright and are kept aright. To try to live the best in the hope that somehow one can put the best into the very air, and get it into the life of the school and community, and have it become a part of public sentiment, that surely is noble. That is the way to live. No one ever lives in vain who so lives. Some one is helped by him. Some one tells of him. Cecil's saying of Sir Walter Raleigh, "I know he can toil terribly," is an electric touch. In one of my pastorates there was a farmer's son, living two miles from the church. Almost all the young men of his age in the village and congregation were careless, selfish, and a little fast. His father was out of sympathy with religious earnestness. But the son resolved that he would put his best into others' lives. He thought, prayed, worshiped, to that end. Through snow and rain and mud he came where earnestness and high ideals were in the air. He did a manly, helpful part in his home, in his village, and in his church. Then, thinking that he knew farming and could teach it, he volunteered to go to an Indian school in Indian Territory, and as a farm manager, teach farming. He went, on almost no salary, and lived and labored, that through his words, conduct, and spirit he might put the best into others' lives. Thus he lived and labored till he died, two thousand miles from home, and was buried there, the only one of his family not placed in the village graveyard. But his work has not died. It lives in all who know of it. They think of it again and again, and it always makes them wish to fulfil to the best all their opportunity for the good of others. There are many, many hearts so conscious of the help they have received from others that they read with appreciation the commemorative tablet placed by the distinguished Pasteur on the house of his birth: "O my father and mother, who lived so simply in that tiny house, it is to you that I owe everything! Your eager enthusiasm, my mother, you passed on into my life. And you, my father, whose life and trade were so toilsome, you taught me what patience can accomplish with prolonged effort. It is to you that I owe tenacity in daily labor." "Others shall sing the song; Others shall right the wrong, Finish what I begin, And all I fail of, win. What matter, I or they, Mine or another's day, So the right word be said, And life the sweeter made." DEVELOPING OUR BEST UNDER DIFFICULTIES. CHAPTER V. DEVELOPING OUR BEST UNDER DIFFICULTIES.