emple and were solemnly
earnest in their prayers, returned to their cheating the day after,
so we give unto God one-seventh part of our time and devote the rest
to the practices of Satan. We are full of wrath and disgust at the
Sunday-school cashier who appropriates the money of other people and,
unable longer to conceal his thefts, flees to Canada. This is
unjust. The poor man was not less pious than his president or his
directors who neglected their duties and in many cases shared in
the luxury. His crime was not in what he did, but in being caught at
it before he could carry out his intent to replace the funds from his
successful speculations. He saw in the leaders of his little
congregation in the Lord, millionaires who had made all they
possessed through fraud, and why should he, with the best intentions,
not accumulate a modest competence through the same means? He
heard nothing to the contrary from the pulpit. The eloquent divine
told, in winning words, of the righteousness of right and the
sinfulness of sin, but the illustrations were all, or nearly all,
two thousand years old, and the words were the words of Isaiah and
the prophets. To denounce the sins of to-day in "the vulgar tongue"
would be to offend the millionaires of the congregation and lessen
the salary of the worthy divine.

The late Chief Justice Chase once startled the writer of this by
saying: "The wicked men are not in the penitentiary, they are in the
churches. The criminals we convict are not wicked, they are simply
weak--weak in character and weak in intellect. The men from whom
society suffers are the cold, selfish, calculating creatures who not
only keep clear of the courts but seek the churches, and deceive
others as they deceive themselves and hope to deceive the Almighty."

Sin is never so dangerous as when it gets to be respectable. The
sanction of law, whether it gets to be such through custom or legal
enactment, so nearly resembles the order of God that we accept it as
such, and if it furthers our selfish greed we take it gladly.

The moral code, like that of municipal law, is made up of a few simple
rules, easily understood, and the trouble comes in on the practice of
the one and the application of the other. That church is divine which
subordinates the rule to the practice, and has works as well as faith
to testify to its commission. That is the true religion which leaves
the sanctuary with the believer, and is with him at all hour