Part 64 (2/2)
On one occasion, when Grant forn city, conversation drifted into references to questionable affairs, when he suddenly rose and said, ”Gentlelory of a lory of a wohts
Isaac Newton's n chemist They were constant associates until one day the Italian told an impure story, after which Newton never would associate with him
”My extreme youth, when I took command of the army of Italy,” said Napoleon, ”rendered it necessary that I should evince great reserve of manners and the utmost severity of morals This was indispensable to enable e and experience I pursued a line of conduct in the highest degree irreproachable and exemplary In spotless morality I was a Cato, and e My supre myself a better man than any other man in the army Had I yielded to human weakness, I should have lost onist and conqueror of Napoleon, the Duke of Wellington, was a man of simple life and austere virtue When he was laid to rest in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral, ”in strea London's central roar,” the poet rote his funeral ode was able to say of hiht He never shall be shamed”
The peril of impurity lies in the insidiousness of the poison Just one taint of i of an unclean story in the fatal corruption of mind and heart
”It is the little rift within the lute That by and by will make the music mute, The little rift within the lover's lute Or little pitted speck in garnered fruit That rotting inward slowly rim was assailed by teers and fled for his life Let the young man who values himself, who sets store upon health and has ambition to succeed in his chosen career, be deaf to unclean speech and flee the companionshi+p of those who think and speak uncleanness
It is the experience of every man who has forsaken vice and turned his feet into the paths of virtue that evil memories will, in his holiest hours, leap upon him like a lion fros me Pictures of his debauches, his past licentiousness, will fill his vision, and the unhappy victim can only beat upon his breast and cry, ”Me h all tiht sanctity in seclusion The saints, the hermits in their caves, the monks in their cells, could never escape the obsessions ofvividness revived past scenes of sin
A boy once showed to another a book of impure words and pictures He to whom the book was shown had it in his hands only a few h office in the church, and years and years afterwards told a friend that he would give half he possessed had he never seen it, because its ies, at the most holy times, would arise unbidden to his mind
Physicians tell us that every particle of the body changes in a very few years; but no chee fros buried for centuries in Pompeii, without the loss of tint or shade, these pictures are as brilliant in age as in youth
association begets assimilation We can notconta defiled
I, because of the vividness of the youthful iestions enter the youthful thought
Indelible and satanic is the taint of the evil suggestive pohich a lewd, questionable picture or story leaves upon theelse more fatally mars the ideals of life and lowers the standard of manhood and womanhood
To read writers whose lines express the utly that not a vulgar word is used, but rosy, glowing, suggestive language--authors who soften evil and show deformity with the tints of beauty--what is this but to take the feet out of the straight road into the guiltiest path of seduction?
Very few realize the power of a diseased ian in a little speck of taint No other faculty has such power to curse or bless mankind, to build up or tear down, to ennoble or debauch, to make happy or ination
Many a ruined life began its downfall in the dry rot of a perverted iination How little we realize that by subtle, ination weave theure and fancy of which will stand out in living colors in the character-web of our lives, to approve or condemn us
Infailure after failure, never reaching, even approximately, the position which was anticipated for hily at his own secret habits, he would find that which, hidden, like the wor impossible all that ennobles, beautifies, and enriches life
”I soleination In that busy and ins the evil
Were it not for his airy iht stand his own master,--not overmatched by the worst part of himself But ah! these summer reveries, these venturesoood purposes,--they are haunted by impure spirits, ill fascinate, bewitch, and corrupt you Blessed are the pure in heart
Blessed art thou, most favored of God, whose THOUGHTS are chastened; whose iination will not breathe or fly in tainted air, and whose path hath been olden reed of purity”
To be pure in heart is the youth's first great commandment Do not listen tois a necessity that is wrong,--that debauches self-respect ”All wickedness is weakness” Vice and vigor have nothing in coth, health, power