In the laboratory of Faraday a workman one day knocked into a jar of acid a silver cup; it disappeared, was eaten up by the acid, and could not be found. The question came up whether it could ever be found. The great chemist came in and put certain chemicals into the jar, and every particle of the silver was precipitated to the bottom. The mass was then sent to a silversmith, and the cup restored. So a precious youth who has fallen into the sink of iniquity, lost, dissolved in sin, can only be restored by the Great Chemist.
What is put into the first of life is put into the whole of life. "Out of a church of twenty-seven hundred members, I have never had to exclude a single one who was received while a child," said Spurgeon. It is the earliest sin that exercises the most influence for evil.
Benedict Arnold was the only general in the Revolution that disgraced his country. He had great military talent, wonderful energy, and a courage equal to any emergency. But Arnold did not start right. Even when a boy he was despised for his cruelty and his selfishness. He delighted in torturing insects and birds that he might watch their sufferings. He scattered pieces of glass and sharp tacks on the floor of the shop he was tending, to cut the feet of the barefooted boys. Even in the army, in spite of his bravery, the soldiers hated him, and the officers dared not trust him.
Let no man trust the first false step
Of guilt; it hangs upon a precipice,
Whose steep descent in last perdition ends.
YOUNG
Years ago there was a district lying near Westminster Abbey, London, called the "Devil's Acre,"—a school for vicious habits, where depravity was universal; where professional beggars were fitted with all the appliances of imposture; where there was an agency for the hire of children to be carried about by forlorn widows and deserted wives, to move the compassion of street-giving benevolence; where young pickpockets were trained in the art and mystery which was to conduct them in due course to an expensive voyage for the good of their country to Botany Bay.
Victor Hugo describes a strange association of men in the seventeenth century who bought children and distorted and made monstrosities of them to amuse the nobility with; and in cultured Boston there is an association of so-called "respectable men," who have opened thousands of "places of business" for deforming men, women, and children's souls. But we deform ourselves with agencies so pleasant that we think we are having a good time, until we become so changed and enslaved that we scarcely recognize ourselves. Vice, the pleasant guest which we first invited into our heart's parlor, becomes vulgarly familiar, and intrenches herself deep in our very being. We ask her to leave, but she simply laughs at us from the hideous wrinkles she has made in our faces, and refuses to go. Our secret sins defy us from the hideous furrows they have cut in our cheeks. Each impure thought has chiseled its autograph deep into the forehead, too deep for erasure, and the glassy, bleary eye adds its testimony to our ruined character.
The devil does not apply his match to the hard coal; but he first lights the shavings of "innocent sins," and the shavings the wood, and the wood the coal. Sin is gradual. It does not break out on a man until it has long circulated through his system. Murder, adultery, theft, are not committed in deed until they have been committed in thought again and again.
"Don't write there," said a man to a boy who was writing with a diamond pin on a pane of glass in the window of a hotel. "Why not?" inquired the boy. "Because you can't rub it out." Yet the glass might have been broken and all trace of the writing lost, but things written upon the human soul can never be removed, for the tablet is immortal.
"In all the wide range of accepted British maxims," said Thomas Hughes, "there is none, take it all in all, more thoroughly abominable than this one, as to the sowing of wild oats. Look at it on what side you will, and I defy you to make anything but a devil's maxim of it. What man, be he young, old, or middle-aged, sows, that, and nothing else, shall he reap. The only thing to do with wild oats is to put them carefully into the hottest part of the fire, and get them burnt to dust, every seed of them. If you sow them, no matter in what ground, up they will come with long, tough roots and luxuriant stalks and leaves, as sure as there is a sun in heaven. The devil, too, whose special crop they are, will see that they thrive, and you, and nobody else, will have to reap them."
We scatter seeds with careless hand,
And dream we ne'er shall see them more;
But for a thousand years
Their fruit appears,
In weeds that mar the land.
JOHN KEBLE.