d
out.

His own brief account of his boyhood shows a very bad boy and he
attempts no disguise. Before he was ten years old he was a habitual
thief and an expert at cheating; even government funds, entrusted to his
father, were not safe from his hands. Suspicion led to the laying of a
snare into which he fell: a sum of money was carefully counted and put
where he would find it and have a chance to steal it. He took it and hid
it under his foot in his shoe, but, he being searched and the money
being found, it became clear to whom the various sums previously missing
might be traced.

His father wished him educated for a clergyman, and before he was eleven
he was sent to the cathedral classical school at Halberstadt to be
fitted for the university. That such a lad should be deliberately set
apart for such a sacred office and calling, by a father who knew his
moral obliquities and offences, seems incredible--but, where a state
church exists, the ministry of the Gospel is apt to be treated as a
human profession rather than as a divine vocation, and so the standards
of fitness often sink to the low secular level, and the main object in
view becomes the so-called "living," which is, alas, too frequently
independent of _holy_ living.

From this time the lad's studies were mixed up with novel-reading and
various vicious indulgences. Card-playing and even strong drink got hold
of him. The night when his mother lay dying, her boy of fourteen was
reeling through the streets, drunk; and even her death failed to arrest
his wicked course or to arouse his sleeping conscience. And--as must
always be the case when such solemn reminders make one no better--he
only grew worse.

When he came to the age for confirmation He had to attend the class for
preparatory religious teaching; but this being to him a mere form, and
met in a careless spirit, another false step was taken: sacred things
were treated as common, and so conscience became the more callous. On
the very eve of confirmation and of his first approach to the Lord's
Table he was guilty of gross sins; and on the day previous, when he met
the clergyman for the customary "confession of sin," he planned and
practised another shameless fraud, withholding from him eleven-twelfths
of the confirmation fee entrusted to him by his father!

In such frames of mind and with such habits of life George Muller, in
the Easter season of 1820, was confirmed and became a communicant.
Confirmed, i