ine or sewing
a lace edge on a ruffle. Is it not strange that there is such distorted
perspective and false balance of values in regard to what is worth
while? The cares of this world crowd out so many supreme things. Many a
temptation in later life would have its antidote if the Holy Spirit
could bring the needed Scripture to mind, but because some one
substituted the lesser for the greater, solicitude for external
appearance instead of inner furnishing, the Word is not there to be
recalled.

HABIT FORMATION

The discussion of these marked characteristics of the life is given
added import when we realize that these years are in the height of the
habit forming period. All through Early Childhood and Childhood every
act has left its faint tracing upon the plastic cells of the brain, and
some of the markings are deep ere now. Just as water will follow its
channel rather than cut a new course, so activity will expend itself in
the well-traced pathways unless prevented from so doing, and the same
thought or stimulus will always tend to go out in the same action. No
thinking is necessary upon these habitual acts which constitute "nine
tenths of life"--they have become mechanical. Not only in the body does
life acquire fixed habits, but also in the soul, in thinking, feeling
and choosing.

The seriousness as well as the value of a habit lies in its tenacity. No
harder task ever confronts a life than to break up one habit and
substitute another after the brain cells grow hard. The process requires
not only that activity be directed away from the pathway that
irresistibly draws it, but at the same time a new groove be traced upon
the hard, unyielding cells. The task is difficult beyond expression.
This is why reformed men always have a hidden fear of lapsing into the
former life. It is the call of the old pathway, traced so deeply in the
brain.

A mature woman, brought up to the strictest Sabbath observance, came to
believe that "the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath,"
and therefore essayed to act on that day according to her reason and
judgment. The attempt was soon abandoned. "There is no pleasure in it,"
she said. "I am constantly fighting the old habits of my girlhood life,
and they will not cease their call to me." This is what the wise king
meant when he said, "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when
he is old he will not depart from it." The whole tendency is to "ask for
the old path