When the scientists proved the indestructibility of matter, when they discovered the doctrine of the conservation of energy, showing us how the coal measures, that warm millions of homes and drive the machinery of land and sea, are but stored-up sunbeams of untold ages gone, they showed us that through all her wonderful changes Nature loses none of her substance. In this splendid formulation of natural law the scientists have done a secondary but more important service; they have given us a symbol from things material, an illustration of a law of the higher sphere. Nothing is ever lost in the spiritual world. A thought with life and truth in it, once set going, can no more be lost than a drop of water falling on the fields can be lost. Professor Harrison, of England, is right in his doctrine of posthumous immortality, as far as it goes. He sees part of a truth and states it well. Whatever force there may be in any human life abides in human life. We may not be able to trace it, as we may not trace the identical dew-drop that glittered on the grass this morning and that, exhaled by the rising sun, has now disappeared from our view, but not from existence. It may well be that the influences that have conspired in shaping our lives--in making us what we are to-day--have in some way come to us from many thousands of lives. In a true sense Moses, David, Paul, Socrates, Plato, Augustine, Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, Luther, Calvin, Wesley, with many others--our parents and teachers above all--all these, and, it may be, myriads more unnamable, live in us to-day. This is what Froude meant when he wrote of Martin Luther, “No man of our times is what he would have been but for Luther.” This is true because Luther’s life so enters into the influences of our times that no man ever brought into relations with him could escape that influence. And few have escaped it; none of the European nations, none of the nations that have been brought into any sort of relations with Christianity and the civilizations that have grown out of it; few, if any, of what we call heathen nations; for the influences of Luther’s life and doctrines are in the missionary movement of our times, that now promises to do for these nations what the coming of Christianity did for Europe, Eastern Asia, and Northern Africa in the first centuries of our era--so changed them as to make a new epoch in history; we might say, a new world. What is true of such a man as Luther is true in a measure--less extensive it may be, less real it cannot be--of every life that has gone before us, and that has, in any way, entered into our own.