What message do you leave the world when you pass by?
No human being can come into this world without increasing or diminishing the sum total of human happiness, not only of the present but of every subsequent age of humanity. No one can detach himself from this connection. There is no sequestered spot in the universe, no dark niche along the disk of non-existence to which he can retreat from his relations to others; where he can withdraw the influence of his existence upon the moral destiny of the world. Everywhere his presence or absence will be felt; everywhere he will have companions who will be better or worse because of him. It is an old saying in one of the fearful and fathomless statements of import, that we are forming characters for eternity. Forming Characters? Who’s, our own or others? Both! And in that momentous fact lays the peril and the responsibility of our existence. Who is sufficient for the thought? Thousands of my fellow beings will yearly enter eternity with characters differing from those they would have carried thither had I never lived. The sunlight of that world will reveal my finger marks in their primary formations and in their successive strata of thought and life.
-Elihu Burrett
