5 Sermon Illustrations on Influence

INFLUENCE, Analogy of The pulsations of the atmosphere, once set in motion by the human voice, cease not to exist with the sounds to which they gave rise. Strong and audible as they may be in the immediate neighborhood of the speaker, and at the immediate moment of utterance, their attenuated force soon becomes inaudible to human ears. The waves of the air thus raised perambulate the earth and ocean's surface; and, in less than twenty hours, every atom of its atmosphere takes up the altered movement due to that infinite small portion of the primitive motion which has been conveyed to it through countless channels, and which must continue to influence its path throughout its future existence. Thus considered, what a strange chaos is this wide atmosphere we breathe! Every atom, impressed with good and with ill, retains at once the motion which sages and philosophers have imparted to it, mixed and combined in ten thousand ways with all that is worthless and base. The air is one vast library, on whose pages are forever written all that man has ever said, or woman whispered. There, in their mutable but unerring characters, mixed with the earliest as well as with the latest sighs of mortality, stand forever recorded vows unredeemed, promises unfulfilled, perpetuating in the united movements of each particle the testimony of man's changeful will. Babbage.

Away among the Alleghanies there is a spring, so small that a single ox could drain it dry on a summer's day. It steals its unobtrusive way among the hills, till it spreads out into the beautiful Ohio; thence it stretches away a thousand miles, leaving on its banks more than a hundred villages and cities, and many thousand cultivated farms, and bearing on its bosom more than half a thousand steamboats; then, joining the Mississippi, it stretches away some twelve hundred miles or more, until it falls into the great emblem of eternity. It is one of the great tributaries of the ocean, which, obedient only to God, shall roll and roar till the angel, with one foot on the sea, and the other on the land, shall lift up his hand to heaven, and swear that time shall be no longer. So with moral influence. It is a rivulet, an ocean, boundless and fathomless as eternity.

Da Vinci's famous painting of "The Lord's Supper," originally adorning the dining-room of a convent, has suffered such destruction from the ravages of time, war, and abuse, that none of its original beauty remains. Yet it has been copied and engraved; and impressions of the great picture have been multiplied through all civilized lands. Behold a parable of posthumous influence.