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 me to sustain authority over men so greatly my superiors in age
and experience. I pursued a line of conduct in the highest degree
irreproachable and exemplary. In spotless morality I was a Cato, and
must have appeared such to all. I was a philosopher and a sage. My
supremacy could be retained only by proving myself a better man than
any other man in the army. Had I yielded to human weakness, I should
have lost my power."

The military antagonist 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 streaming
London's central roar," the poet who wrote his funeral ode was able to
say of him:

"Whatever record leap to light
He never shall be shamed."

The peril of impurity lies in the insidiousness of the poison. Just
one taint of impurity, one glance at a lewd picture, one hearing of an
unclean story may begin 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 molders all."

When Bunyan's pilgrim was assailed by temptation he stopped his ears
with his fingers 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 companionship 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 from ambush. Into the harmony of the
hymn he sings memory will interpolate unbidden, the words of some
sensual song. Pictures of his debauches, his past licentiousness, will
fill his vision, and the unhappy victim can only beat upon his breast
and cry, "Me miserable! Whither shall I flee?" This has been, through
all time, the experience of the men that have sought sanctity in
seclusion. The saints, the hermits in their caves, the monks in their
cells, could never escape the obsessio