tful head. But to show you how one or the other may trouble a
man, and what a vast extent of frontier is left unridden by this
invaluable eighth commandment, let me tell you a few pages out of a
young man's life.

He was a friend of mine; a young man like others; generous, flighty, as
variable as youth itself, but always with some high motives and on the
search for higher thoughts of life. I should tell you at once that he
thoroughly agrees with the eighth commandment. But he got hold of some
unsettling works, the New Testament among others, and this loosened his
views of life and led him into many perplexities. As he was the son of a
man in a certain position, and well off, my friend had enjoyed from the
first the advantages of education, nay, he had been kept alive through a
sickly childhood by constant watchfulness, comforts, and change of air;
for all of which he was indebted to his father's wealth.

At college he met other lads more diligent than himself, who followed
the plough in summer-time to pay their college fees in winter; and this
inequality struck him with some force. He was at that age of a
conversible temper, and insatiably curious in the aspects of life; and
he spent much of his time scraping acquaintance with all classes of man-
and woman-kind. In this way he came upon many depressed ambitions, and
many intelligences stunted for want of opportunity; and this also struck
him. He began to perceive that life was a handicap upon strange,
wrong-sided principles; and not, as he had been told, a fair and equal
race. He began to tremble that he himself had been unjustly favoured,
when he saw all the avenues of wealth, and power, and comfort closed
against so many of his superiors and equals, and held unwearyingly open
before so idle, so desultory, and so dissolute a being as himself. There
sat a youth beside him on the college benches who had only one shirt to
his back, and, at intervals sufficiently far apart, must stay at home to
have it washed. It was my friend's principle to stay away as often as he
dared; for I fear he was no friend to learning. But there was something
that came home to him sharply, in this fellow who had to give over
study till his shirt was washed, and the scores of others who had never
an opportunity at all. _If one of these could take his place_, he
thought; and the thought tore away a bandage from his eyes. He was eaten
by the shame of his discoveries, and despised himself as an unwo