give you my hard earnings for it. I will give you more than that. I married a wife, and promised to love and cherish her and protect her—ah! ah! and I have driven her out to work for me, and I have stolen her wages and I have brought them to you-give me drink, and I will give you them! More yet; I have snatched the bit of bread from the white lips of my famished child-I will give you that if you will give me drink! More yet; I will give you my health! More yet; I will give you my manliness! More yet; I will give you my hopes of heavenbody and soul! I will barter jewels worth all the kingdoms of the earth-for "what will a man give in exchange for his soul"-all these for a dram! Give it to me!"" Young man, water never made a man such a slave as that. No drink nor food in nature ever wrought such evil to men. poisons that work such havoc; and it will yet come to pass that the community or state that licenses the making of such slaves of men by the drink traffic will be deemed to be in league with hell.

It is only the

How do men become slaves of error? How do men become thieves, liars, lecherous beasts, and men of violence and blood? By the teachings of parents or others, it may be-more generally, however, by little acts of dishonesty; by slight deviations from truth; by hearing or telling stories they would blush to their finger-tips to have their mother, sister, or a virtuous maiden hear; by little acts of cruelty and robbery repeated till the heart is hardened and conscience is stifled, and the brain inhabited by unholy, cruel, and foul things, and the nature finally sets wholly to evil.

Acts form habits; habits form character (from the Greek charassein, to cut furrows, to engrave); and character tends constantly and swiftly to fixedness. And when the plastic mind of the child and youth has hardened into the man of evil, what can change him? When he is old he will not depart from the way in which he was trained when a child; unless it be that some miracle of grace somewhere arrest him, and the Infinite One change the "heart of stone" again to one "of

flesh." But will he? and where? and when? We see here how quickly the folly of the child becomes the vice of the youth, and then the crime of the man. When each of us shall enter upon the next state of our being, shall we find the law of that life to be what the Scriptures forewarn us-to wit, "he that is holy shall be holy yet more-and he that is filthy shall be filthy yet more "? If so, how fearful to enter it in chains to evil habits of whatever name or kind!

How and What to Read,

REV. JAMES W. COLE, B.D.

ENELON declared, "If the riches of the Indies or the crowns of all the kingdoms of Europe were laid at my feet in exchange for my love of reading, I would spurn them all." Would you? Think for a moment what it means. On the one hand it means to have more wealth and worldly grandeur and power than any one man has ever had. And for it you are asked to give up the "love of reading." Would you do it? Stay a moment,- what does that involve? An ignorant, belittled, besotted soul, for time and eternity! The mind, the soul, can no more live without knowledge than the body can without food.

There are three sources of knowledge, — experience, conversation, reading. How exceedingly limited would be one's experience and conversation, without one's reading, or the reading of others. Books contain the experience, the conversation, the investigation, the thoughts, the deeds of the world's men and women. Books contain the knowledge of the ages concerning other worlds and beings, and our duties or relations to them. Books feed the mind, develop the soul. How few, and feeble, and absurd, and childish, are the thoughts and deeds of the peoples who have no books! How they wallow in ignorance and mere animalism! Of what benefit then would the world's wealth be to such a savage or an ignoramus who would not read, but preferred the world's gold to reading? Books are the world's ages of wisdom, stored for the benefit of coming peoples. What infinite misery and suffering we should be saved from if we but heeded their story!