LITTLE THINGS BY Charles Robert Morrison

of reason and righteousness, is made idiotic by strong drink. Year after
year they tamper with and toil against the tide, trying to prove the truth
of God untrue.
Against him coming with unsteady step--or even with the poison upon
his breath . . .
the gates of social purity are shut,
employment is denied,
love grows sullen and disappears, and
the kingdom of grace closes her portals.
If at last, by a resolute will, aided by Divine mercy, the drinker reforms
and seeks the path of sobriety, he may wish, and wish in vain, to be back
where the paths parted, and where first he was assigned a lesson he
refused to learn. Go where he will, the ex-convict cannot find the place
where innocence left him, and felony became a part of his history. If he
could, what pilgrimages he would make to get where the deed had never
been done; where the consciousness of wrong-doing was not only
absent, but not a part either of any other being in all God's universe.
John B. Gough looked back upon seven years counted as worse than lost,
as a period of blackness that stood out in horror before him. Seven
years that can never be regained; seven years of sin and self-degradation;
seven years that might have put him far along in moral likeness to Him
who knew no sin, though the Friend of sinners.
Do you know of men who have hoped to live until they should reform,
and yet in the end have failed? These are our teachers. They learned, too
late for them, that a single day is too long to put off obedience to God.
Their life is like the troubled sea, which cannot rest, whose waters cast
up mire and dirt. Better far that men should take the Word of God as
their guide, than to be compelled to contemplate these sad experiences,
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