, on the rock, gibbering
with curses or groaning ineffectual prayer. By all means encourage
healthful inquisitiveness, by all means discourage ill regulated
curiosity.

TREACHEROUS FRUIT.

The subject of the morning also impresses me with the fact that fruits
that are sweet to the taste may afterward produce great agony.
Forbidden fruit for Eve was so pleasant she invited her husband also
to take of it; but her banishment from Paradise, and six thousand
years of sorrow, and wretchedness, and war, and woe paid for that
luxury. Sin may be very sweet at the start, and it may induce great
wretchedness afterward. The cup of sin is sparkling at the top, but
there is death at the bottom. Intoxication has great exhilaration for
a while, and it fillips the blood, and it makes a man see five stars
where others can see only one star, and it makes the poor man rich,
and turns cheeks which are white red as roses; but what about the
dreams that come after, when he seems falling from great heights, or
is prostrated by other fancied disasters, and the perspiration stands
on the forehead, the night dew of everlasting darkness, and he is
ground under the horrible hoof of nightmares shrieking with lips that
crackle with all-consuming torture? "Rejoice, O young man, in thy
youth, and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth; but know
thou, that for all these things God will bring thee into judgment!"

SWEET AT THE START,

horrible at the last. Go into that hall of revelry, where ungodly
mirth staggers and blasphemes. Listen to the senseless gabble, see the
last trace of intelligence dashed out from faces made in God's own
image.

"Aha! aha!" says the roystering inebriate; "this is joy for you; fill
high your cups, my boys. I drink to my wife's misery and my children's
rags and my God's defiance." And he knows not that a fiend stirs the
goblet in his hand and that adders uncoil from the dregs and thrust
their forked tongues hissing through the froth on the rim.

PERDITION BOUGHT FOR A SIXPENCE.

The Philistines jeered and laughed and shouted at Samson. Oh, they
wanted him to make sport for them, and he made sport for them! How
bright and gay was the scene for a little while! After awhile the
giant puts one hand against this pillar, and the other hand against
this pillar, and bows himself, and three thousand merry-makers are
mashed like grapes in a wine-press. Sin rapturous at the start, awful
at the last.

That on