Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: and is the same yesterday, to-day and forever! " For our citizenship is in heaven, from whence we wait for a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, according to the working whereby he is able even to subject all things unto himself," Phil. iii. 20. "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and to-day, yea and forever," Heb. xiii. 8. August Valfrid Lonnegren. Article III. Influence. The susceptibility of the soul to influence when considered in all its bearings, is to one who has the welfare of mankind at heart both encouraging and discouraging. It suggests at once the gravest apprehension and the most ardent hope. On the one hand, we see an aggregation of bad influences surrounding men, diffusing a subtle poison, stifling and crippling all their good impulses, distorting and malforming their growth, and as would seem, making their improvement an utter impossibility. We are influenced in a very potent way by what we see, read, think, by our companionships, and above all by the subtle magnetism which loads the social and religious atmosphere we breathe. Unconsciously character takes its type and color from these. The chemically prepared plate which the phographer uses is scarcely more sensitive to the light than is the human soul to these outward conditions. The strong and weak are vulnerable to their touch. Had we a mental and spiritual laboratory equal to the work, by which we could analyze character with the accuracy with which the chemist analyzes material substances, doubtless we should place a very large percentage of what goes to make up good and bad character to the account of circumstances and education. As themost conspicuous qualities, good and bad, which had excited ...