ret thoughts may as surely be drawn from the
path of duty by secret temptation, by the admission of evil suggestions,
and they will affect our characters as injuriously as those more palpable
and tangible temptations that attack our sense.

"This life is a state of discipline; a school in which to form character.
There is not an event that comes to our knowledge, not a sentence that we
read, not a person with whom we converse, not an act of our lives, in
short, not a thought which we conceive, but is acting upon and moulding
that character into a shape of good or evil; and, however unconscious we
may be of the fact, a thought, casually conceived in the solitariness and
silence and darkness of midnight, may so modify and change the current of
our future conduct that a blessing or a curse to millions may flow from
it.

"All our thoughts are mysteriously connected with good or evil. Their
very habits, too, like the habits of our actions, are strengthened by
indulgence, and, according as we indulge the evil or the good, our
characters will partake of the moral character of each. But actions
proceed from thoughts; we act as we think. Why should we, then, so
cautiously guard our actions from impropriety while we give a loose rein
to our thoughts, which so certainly, sooner or later, produce their
fruits in our actions?

"God in his wisdom has separated at various distances sin and the
consequence of sin. In some instances we see a sin instantly followed by
its fruits, as of revenge by murder. In others we see weeks and months
and years, aye, and ages, too, elapse before the fruits of a single act,
the result, perhaps, of a single thought, are seen in all their varieties
of evil.

"How long ere the fruits of one sin in Paradise will cease to be visible
in the moral universe?

"If this reasoning is correct, I shall but cheat myself in preserving a
good moral outward appearance to others if every thought of the heart, in
the most secret retirement, is not carefully watched and checked and
guarded from evil; since the casual indulgence of a single evil thought
in secret may be followed, long after that thought is forgotten by me,
and when, perhaps, least expected, by overt acts of evil.

"Who, then, shall say that in those pleasures in which we indulge, and
which by many are called, and apparently are, innocent, there are not
laid the seeds of many a corrupt affection? Who shall say that my
innocent indulgence at the card