sk advice on every important
matter. How many mistakes in life would have been prevented if those
making them had only asked advice from the proper persons and followed
it. Your parents have traveled the road of life before you. Now it is
known to them and they can point out its dangers. To you the road is
entirely new, and it will be only after you have traveled it and arrived
nearly at its end in the latter days of your life that you also will be
able to advise others how to pass through it in safety. This road can be
traveled only once, so be advised by those who have learned its many
dangers by their own experience. You should be very glad that those of
experience are willing to teach you, and if you neglect their warnings
you will be very sorry for it someday.

Lesson 34
FROM THE SEVENTH TO THE END OF THE TENTH COMMANDMENT

373 Q. What is the Seventh Commandment?
A. The Seventh Commandment is: Thou shalt not steal.

Stealing is one of those vices of which you have to be most careful.
Children should learn to have honest hearts, and never to take unjustly
even the smallest thing; for some begin a life of dishonesty by stealing
little things from their own house or from stores to which they are sent
for goods. A nut, a cake, an apple, a cent, etc., do not seem much, but
nevertheless to take any of them dishonestly is stealing. Children who
indulge in this trifling thievery seldom correct the habit in after life
and grow up to be dishonest men and women. How do you suppose all the
thieves now spending their miserable lives in prison began? Do you
believe they were very honest--never having stolen even the slightest
thing--up to a certain day, and at once became thieves by committing a
highway robbery? No; they began by stealing little things, then greater,
and kept on till they made stealing their business and thus became
professional thieves. Again, the little you steal each day does not seem
much at the time, but if you put all the "littles" together you may soon
have something big, and almost before you know it--if you intend to
continue stealing--you may have taken enough to make you guilty of
mortal sin. If you intended to steal, for instance, only a small amount
every day for the whole year, you would at the end have stolen a large
amount and committed a mortal sin. There are many ways of violating the
Seventh Commandment. Workmen who do not do a just day's work, or
employers who cheat their workmen out