right time and place, may do as much in five minutes, in pushing
forward a general cause, as another man can do by the laborious drudgery
of years. The words of the speaker touch the secret springs of action in
a thousand breasts. He sends away a thousand men and women animated with
a new impulse to duty, and that impulse is propagated and reproduced
through hundreds of channels for long years to come.

Words are never entirely idle. They have at times a power like that of
the electric bolt. They may sting like a serpent, and bite like an
adder. In the ordinary intercourse of society, a man of good
conversational powers may, even in discharging the customary civilities
of life, put forth a large influence. The words dropped from minute to
minute, throughout the day, in the millions of little transactions all
the while going on between man and man, have an incalculable power in
the general aggregate of the forces which keep society in motion.

As with spoken, so with written words. The man who knows how to weave
them into combinations which shall gain the popular ear, and sink into
the popular heart, has a mighty gift for good or evil. The self-denying
and almost saintly Heber, by all his years of personal toil on the
plains of India, did not accomplish a tithe of what has been
accomplished for the cause of missions by his one Missionary Hymn. It
would hardly be an exaggeration to say that those few written words are
worth more to the cause than the lives of scores of ordinary
missionaries. How many anxious souls, just wavering between a right and
a wrong decision, have been led to make the final choice, and to decide
for Christ, by that beautiful hymn beginning "Just as I am, without one
plea"? Who can doubt that the patient invalid of Torquay, in the hour
that she penned those touching words, did more for the conversion of
sinners than many a minister of the gospel has done in the course of a
long and laborious life? What a fund of consolation for pious hearts
through all time is laid up in the hymns of that other sweet singer,
Mrs. Steele?

But as with spoken, so with written words, the great aggregate of their
force is not contained in these few brilliant and striking exceptions,
but in the millions of mere ordinary paragraphs which meet the eye from
day to day, in the columns of the daily and weekly press, and which have
apparently but an ephemeral existence. The dashing torrent and the
mighty river are the more n