sent to school and required to attend church, without being taught at
home and being instructed in the Catechism and in the Bible, and without
being shown their duty to God and their fellow men, they would all be
pretty much alike. It is the difference in the influences that are made
to refine some boys that causes them to differ so much from others who
are about them. The boy who has only been taught to pick stones, or
sweep the streets, or dig ditches, may cry out against the boy who is
gentlemanly, and obliging, and obedient, and truthful, and reliable, and
who has a position of great responsibility in a bank, or in the office
of some man who occupies a very responsible position; yet oftentimes,
and quite universally, there is a very great difference in the merit and
value of these two boys. One has been disciplined and governed and
controlled, educated and taught, while the other has likely been
neglected, and consequently has not learned the importance of these
things.

God designs to refine all of us, and therefore He desires that all
should be taught to study, should learn to read and write, should learn
all they can from the schools, should be taught to work, should be
taught to expect trials and self-denials, and should be led to expect
sickness and disappointments, and all these things by which God designs
to make us better from year to year. But, just the same as the iron
would cry out against being cast into the fire and being beaten upon the
anvil, so do boys and girls, and men and women also, cry out against the
providences by which God is refining them and making them better for
this world and fitting them for the world to come.

If we desire to be of largest service in this world, and to occupy a
place of honor in the world to come, we must expect that God will deal
with us, as He has told us in the ninth verse of the thirteenth chapter
of Zechariah, in which He says, "I will refine them as silver is
refined, and will try them as gold is tried." And in the book of Malachi
He says that He, that is God, is "like a refiner's fire, and like
fullers' soap, and He shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and
purge them as gold and silver."

When the gold and the silver is cast into the crucible to be purified,
the fire is made very hot, and the metal is left in the crucible until
the man who is refining it and who sits looking into the crucible can
see his own image reflected in the metal. So we are c