here for six months. I have a wife and three
children, but I cannot write to them or hear from them." The poor
man was in terrible mental agony.

I said, "Why don't you go back and give yourself up and face the
law, and ask God to forgive you?"

He said, "I would take the first train to-morrow and give myself up,
except for one thing. I have a wife and three children; how can I
bring the disgrace upon them?"

I, too, have a wife and three children, and when he said that, the
thing looked very different.

Ah! if we could do our own reaping, it would not be so bitter, but
when we make our little children or the wife of our bosom, or our
old gray-haired mother, or our old father reap with us, isn't the
reaping pretty bitter? I don't fear any pestilence or any disease as
much as I fear sin. If God will only keep sin out of thy family, I
will praise Him in time and in eternity. The worst enemy that ever
crossed a man's path is sin.

If a man comes to me for advice I always try to put myself in the
place of the one to whom I am talking, and then to give the best
advice I can. I said to this man,

"I don't know what to say, but it is safe to pray."

After I had prayed, I urged him to pray; but he said:

"If I do, it means the penitentiary."

I asked him to come the next day at twelve. He met me at the
appointed hour, and said:

"It is all settled; if I ever meet the God of Bethel I must go
through the prison to meet Him, and God helping me, I will give
myself up. I am going back, and I should like to have you keep quiet
until I give myself over into the hands of the law; then you may
hold me up as a warning. Little did I think when I started out in
life that I was coming to this! Little did I think when I married a
girl from one of the first families in the state that I should bring
such disgrace on her."

At four o'clock that afternoon he went back to Missouri. He reached
home a little past midnight, and spent a week with his family. In a
letter he said that he didn't dare let his children know he was
there, lest they should tell the neighbor's children. At night he
would creep out and look at his children, but he couldn't take them
in his arms or kiss them. Oh, there is the result of sin! Would to
God we could every one of us just turn from sin to-day!

One day, when this man was in hiding, he heard his little boy say:

"Mamma, doesn't papa love us any more?"

"Yes," his mother replied. "Why do you ask?"