man who is fond precociously of
stirring may be a spoon, but the man who lies in bed half the day is
something worse. Then it must be remembered that a single indulgence in
one luxury produces scarcely any effect on the mind or body, but a habit
of indulging in that luxury has a great effect.

"The sins which practice burns into the blood,
And not the one dark hour which brings remorse
Will brand us after of whose fold we be."

I am surely right in noticing that the rich man is said to have fared
sumptuously _every_ day, as though faring sumptuously might have no
significance, but the constantly faring sumptuously was what had degraded
and debased the man below the level of the beggar at his gate. I feel
that to be luxurious occasionally is no bad thing, if we can keep our
self-control, and return constantly to simple habits. There is something
very natural in the prayer which a little child was overheard to
make--"God, make me a good little girl, but"--after a pause--"naughty
sometimes." It is the habit of being naughty which is pernicious. Can
anyone doubt that the man who, on the whole, leads a hardy and not over-
indulgent life will be more capable of performing any duty which may
devolve upon him than a man who "had but fed on the roses and lain in the
lilies of life."

Sydney Smith, in his sketches of Moral Philosophy, notices that habits of
indulgence grow on us so much that we go through the act of indulgence
without noticing it or feeling the pleasure of it; yet, if some accident
occurs to rob us of our accustomed pleasure, we feel the want of it most
keenly. Speaking of Hobbes, the philosopher, he says that he had twelve
pipes of tobacco laid by him every night before he began to write.
Without this luxury "he could have done nothing; all his speculations
would have been at an end, and without his twelve pipes he might have
been a friend to devotion or to freedom, which in the customary tenour of
his thoughts he certainly was not."

In Fielding's _Life of Jonathan Wild_ Mr. Wild plays at cards with the
Count. "Such was the power of habit over the minds of these illustrious
persons that Mr. Wild could not keep his hands out of the Count's pockets
though he knew they were empty, nor could the Count abstain from palming
a card though he was well aware Mr. Wild had no money to pay him."

If we are curious to know who is the most degraded and most wretched of
human beings, look for the man who