Again, how much weight is there in Job's remarkable expression (ch. 31:5), I have made a covenant with my eyes! The eye, the most active of our senses, is the chiefest inlet of temptation, and hence the apostle John specifies "the lust of the eyes" as a leading form or type of ordinary sins. The lad in the case before us allowed his eye to dwell on the letter, until the covetous desire to appropriate it had grown into a fixed purpose. Had he made the same covenant as Job, and turned his eye resolutely away as soon as he felt the first wrongful emotion in his heart, the result had been widely different. But he rather imitated the unhappy Achan, who, in recounting his sin, says, "When I saw among the spoils a Babylonish garment and two hundred shekels of silver, and a wedge of gold, then I coveted them." A fool's eyes soon lead his hands astray.
Here also we see the deceitfulness of the heart. A mere boy of fifteen years, of good ordinary training, at least in part connected with a Sunday-school, and not prompted by any urgent bodily necessity, commits a crime punishable by fine and imprisonment. Had any one foretold to him a week before even the possibility of this occurrence, how indignantly would he have spurned the very thought! That he should become, and deservedly so, the inmate of a felon's cell—how monstrous the supposition! Yet so it came to pass. The heart is deceitful above all things, and he who trusts in it is "cursed." Multitudes find their own case the renewal of Hazael's experience. When Elijah told him the enormities he, when on the throne of Syria, would practice, he exclaimed—"Is thy servant a dog that he should do these things?" He was not then, but he afterwards became just such a dog.
But if the heart be deceitful, sin is scarcely less so. When the poor boy first clutched his prize, as he esteemed it, he promised himself nothing but pleasure and profit, but how miserably was he deceived! After he had converted the draft into money, and thus rendered its return impossible without detection, he saw his guilt in its true character, and for many nights tossed in torment on a sleepless bed, while at last he was made to take his place along with hardened convicts in a city prison. Thus it always is with sin. Like the book the apostle ate in vision, it is sweet as honey in the mouth, but bitter in the belly. Like the wine Solomon describes, it may sparkle in the cup and shoot up its bright beads on the surface, but at the last it biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder. The experiment has been tried times without number, from the beginning in Eden down to our own day, by communities and by individuals, but invariably with the same result. The way of transgressors is hard, however it may seem to them who are entering upon it a path of primrose dalliance. And surely "whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise."
Finally, how needful is it to pray—"Lead us not into temptation." Snares lie all around us, whether old or young, and it is vain to seek an entire escape from their intrusion. The lad we are considering, had not gone out of his way to meet the temptation by which he fell. On the contrary, he was doing his duty, he was just where he ought to have been. Yet there the adversary found him, and there he finds every man. The very fact that one is in a lawful place and condition is apt to throw him off his guard. There is but one safeguard under grace, and that is habitual watchfulness. Without this the strongest may fall—with it, the feeblest may stand firm. O for such a deep and abiding conviction of the keenness of temptation and the dreadful evil of sin as to lead all to cry mightily unto God, and at the same time be strenuous in effort themselves—to pray and also to watch.
Original.
MEMOIR OF MRS. VAN LENNEP.
The following review, written by Mrs. D.E. Sykes, of the Memoir of Mrs. M.E. Van Lennep, we deem among the finest specimens of that class of writings. The remarks it contains on the religious education of daughters are so much in point, and fall in so aptly with the design of our work, that we have obtained permission to publish it. We presume it will be new to most of our readers, as it originally appeared in the New Englander, a periodical which is seldom seen, except in a Theological Library.
An additional reason for our publishing it is, our personal interest both in the reviewer, who we are happy to say has become a contributor to our pages, and the reviewed—having been associated with the mothers of each, for a number of years, in that most interesting of all associations, "The Mother's Meeting."
For eleven years, Mary E. Hawes, afterwards Mrs. Van Lennep, was an attentive and interested listener to the instructions given to the children at our quarterly meetings—and it is interesting to know that her mother regards the influence of those meetings as powerfully aiding in the formation of her symmetrical Christian character.