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  LIFE
  by J.R. Miller
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DESCRIPTION
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CONTENT
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A twofold influence attends and follows every life:  the one is planned
and intentional,   the other is unpurposed and unconscious.

A man lives fifty years of active life in a community, growing from
poverty to wealth; and there are two classes of results left behind him
when he is gone. There are the buildings he has erected, the business he
has established and organized, the improvements he has made in the town,
and the wealth he has accumulated; these are all purposed results. He
lived to do these things; he thought about them, and then with labor and
pains wrought them out. But while he has been toiling and building, with
earnest ambition and intense energy, he has, day by day, been leaving
behind him another class of results, which were not in his plans, and
the columns of which he does not calculate up when he estimates how much
he has made during his life, or which he does not bequeath when he
writes his will. These are the things he has done along the years of his
busy life, by the words he has spoken in daily fellowship with men, by
his attitudes and his dispositions, by the little wayside ministries
which he has wrought ofttimes without conscious thought or intention,
and through the silent influence that has flowed forth from his
character and example, as fragrance is poured out on the air by a sweet
flower, or as the soft beams of light stream in welcome radiance from a
star.

Every life has this double history, and leaves this double record. In
the ordinary reckoning of the results achieved by men—only the
purposed things are counted. We say he made a million dollars; or we
point to the bridges he built, or the cathedrals he planned, or the
pictures he painted, or the books he wrote; or we say he traveled so
many miles, and preached so many sermons, and made so many visits; or we
sum up in our funeral eulogy the great and conspicuous things of his
career—and we think we have given all his biography; but we have not.
There is a part of his history that is never written, that cannot be
written; and it is probable that in nearly every life—this is the
better part, that a godly man\

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Source: https://sermonindex.net/speakers/jr-miller/life/
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