nothing but the vainest, the silliest, the emptiest, the most degraded natures. There is no stronger hallucination, no more astonishing proof of the sorceries of Satan, than his success in deceiving youths into the notion that vice is manly. It takes a man to be virtuous; but to be vicious is within the capacity of the poorest beast.

CHAPTER IX.

DUTY WELL KNOWN.

EVERY one of us knows our duty; there is no difficulty there. We all know how we ought to walk and to please God. God could not have made it plainer for us had He emblazoned it on the stars of heaven. The rules of duty are very short, very simple; they might easily be written on the palm of the hand. Love God ; honour thy parents; slay not; hate not; steal not; be pure; be truthful; be contented;—there is the Decalogue, and in those ten words lie the germs of all religion and of all morality.

There are thousands of voices to teach it us.

There is the voice of our Bible, telling us from the first page to the last the laws of reverence and honesty, the laws of charity and truth.

There is all History, with its story of virtuous

nations dominant, and vicious nations moulder

ing to decay.

There is all Biography, with its lives of bad men to show us how curses dog the heels of wickedness; and its lives of good men to show you how we may make our lives sublime.

And if we be too careless or too ignorant for these, there are two voices to which we must listen one is the voice of Conscience, that blushing, shame-faced spirit which mutinies in every sinning heart: the other is the voice of Experience our own and that of others-to show us unmistakably that all acts and habits of sin tend sometimes to physical ruin, sometimes to mental imbecility, always to moral and spiritual death; while every good act and every good habit is health and joy and peace-fills for us the breeze with music, and makes the primrose brighter in the spring.

Now from all these voices we learn the unanimous and unmistakable lesson that whatever God forbids us is ruinous, and whatever He commands is right. It is the meaning of

all the present and all the past. To the good soldier of Jesus Christ the spirits of all the blessed dead seem to crowd the sunlit hills as with a splendid circle of invisible spectators, unfolding before us their victorious banners, and calling us to be as they, who wrought and fought and overcame; while, from the sea and from the sod start up, with the agony upon their faces the pale phantoms of the lost-of those who preferred corruption to holiness, and death to life; and in their defeat and misery these ruined spirits not now, as in their lifetime, tempting to sin with subtle enticements and mocking words-wail amid the storms in which the soul is weltering, and with their wasted hands wave back the guilty steersman from sunken rocks.

CHAPTER X.

THE INSPIRATION OF DUTY.

AND what comes of obedience to the law of duty?

There comes of it, in one word, all that is best, all that is greatest, in this world's history. Duty has been the mainspring of every god-like action, the polestar of every holy life.

It was duty that prompted to Joseph, under temptation, the eternal protest of innocent and noble youth.

It was duty that drove Moses from Pharaoh's palace to bear the mutinies and murmurs of a jealous race.

It was duty that made the ruddy shepherd lad face for his people the giant champion, for his sheep the lion and the bear.

It was duty that made Elijah brave the raging idolatress, and John the adulterous king.

It was duty that sent Paul, in weakness and