on which this formula is based. One of the aptest descriptions of
a human being is that he is a mirror. As we sat at table to-night
the world in which each of us lived and moved through this day was
focused in the room. What we saw when we looked at one another was
not one another, but one another's world. We were an arrangement
of mirrors. The scenes we saw were all reproduced; the people we
met walked to and fro; they spoke, they bowed, they passed us by,
did everything over again as if it had been real. When we talked,
we were but looking at our own mirror and describing what flitted
across it; our listening was not hearing, but seeing--we but looked
on our neighbor's mirror.
All human intercourse is a seeing of reflections. I meet a stranger
in a railway carriage. The cadence of his first words tell me he
is English and comes from Yorkshire. Without knowing it he has
reflected his birthplace, his parents, and the long history of their
race. Even physiologically he is a mirror. His second sentence
records that he is a politician, and a faint reflection in the way
he pronounces THE TIMES reveals his party. In his next remarks I
see reflected a whole world of experiences. The books he has read,
the people he has met, the companions he keeps, the influences
that have played upon him and made him the man he is--these are
all registered there by a pen which lets nothing pass, and whose
writing can
Never be blotted out.
What I am reading in him meantime he is also reading in me; and
before the journey is over we could half write each other's lives.
Whether we like it or not, we live in glass houses. The mind, the
memory, the soul, is simply a vast chamber paneled with looking-glass.
And upon this miraculous arrangement and endowment depends the
capacity of mortal souls to "reflect the character of the Lord."
(2). But this is not all. If all these varied reflections
from our so-called secret life are patent to the world, how close
the writing, complete the record within the soul itself! For the
influences we meet are not simply held for a moment on the polished
surface and thrown off again into space. Each is retained where
first it fell, and stored up in the soul forever.