in the last second rush through
three hundred and four feet till earth stops it. Habit is cumulative.
After each act of our lives we are not the same person as before, but
quite another, better or worse, but not the same. There has been
something added to, or deducted from, our weight of character.

"There is no fault nor folly of my life," said Ruskin; "that does not
rise against me and take away my joy, and shorten my power of
possession, of sight, of understanding; and every past effort of my
life, every gleam of righteousness or good in it, is with me now to
help me in my grasp of this hour and its vision."

"Many men of genius have written worse scrawls than I do," said a boy
at Rugby when his teacher remonstrated with him for his bad penmanship;
"it is not worth while to worry about so trivial a fault." Ten years
later, when he had become an officer in the Crimea, his illegible copy
of an order caused the loss of many brave men.

"Resist beginning" was an ancient motto which is needed in our day.
The folly of the child becomes the vice of the youth, and then the
crime of the man.

In 1880 one hundred and forty-seven of the eight hundred and
ninety-seven inmates of Auburn State Prison were there on a second
visit. What brings the prisoner back the second, third, or fourth
time? It is habit which drives him on to commit the deed which his
heart abhors and which his very soul loathes. It is the momentum made
up from a thousand deviations from the truth and right, for there is a
great difference between going just right and a little wrong. It is
the result of that mysterious power which the repeated act has of
getting itself repeated again and again.

When a woman was dying from the effects of her husband's cruelty and
debauchery from drink she asked him to come to her bedside, and pleaded
with him again for the sake of their children to drink no more.
Grasping his hand with her thin, long fingers, she made him promise
her: "Mary, I will drink no more till I take it out of this hand which
I hold in mine." That very night he poured out a tumbler of brandy,
stole into the room where she lay cold in her coffin, put the tumbler
into her withered hand, and then took it out and drained it to the
bottom. John B. Gough told this as a true story. How powerless a man
is in the presence of a mighty habit, which has robbed him of
will-power, of self-respect, of everything manly, until he becomes its
slave!

Walp