ely, the position which
was anticipated for him, if he would look frankly into his own heart,
and searchingly at his own secret habits, he would find that which,
hidden, like the worm at the heart of the rose, is destroying and
making impossible all that ennobles, beautifies, and enriches life.

"I solemnly warn you," says Beecher, "against indulging a morbid
imagination. In that busy and mischievous faculty begins the evil.
Were it not for his airy imagination, man might stand his own
master,--not overmatched by the worst part of himself. But ah! these
summer reveries, these venturesome dreams, these fairy castles, builded
for no good purposes,--they are haunted by impure spirits, who will
fascinate, bewitch, and corrupt you. Blessed are the pure in heart.
Blessed art thou, most favored of God, whose THOUGHTS are chastened;
whose imagination will not breathe or fly in tainted air, and whose
path hath been measured by the golden reed of purity."

To be pure in heart is the youth's first great commandment. Do not
listen to men who tell you that "vice is a necessity." Nothing is a
necessity that is wrong,--that debauches self-respect. "All wickedness
is weakness." Vice and vigor have nothing in common. Purity is
strength, health, power.

Do not imagine that impurity can be hidden! One may as well expect to
have consumption or any other deadly disease, and to look and appear
healthy, as to be impure in thought and mind, and to look and appear
manly and noble souled. Character writes its record in the flesh.

"No, no, these are not trifles," said George Whitefield, when a friend
asked why he was so particular to bathe frequently, and always have his
linen scrupulously clean; "a minister must be without spot, even in his
garments." Purity in a good man can not be carried too far.

There is a permanency in the stamp left by the sins resulting from
impure thought that follows even to the grave. Diseases unnameable,
the consequences of the Scarlet Sin, the following after the "strange
woman," write their record in the very bones, literally fulfilling the
Scripture statement--"Their sins shall lie down with their bones in the
dust."

We often detect in the eye and in the manner the black leper spots of
impurity long before the youth suspects they have ever been noticed.
When there is a scar or a stain upon one's self-respect it is bound to
appear on the surface sooner or later. What fearful blots and stains
a