Do not, therefore, get into the habit of reading foolish story-papers and cheap novels.  Read good books in which you can find information that will be useful to you all through your life.

If now and then you read story-books for amusement or rest from study, let them be good story-books, written by good authors.  Ask someone’s advice about the books you read—­someone who is capable of giving such advice:  your pastor, your teachers, and frequently your parents and friends.  Learn all through your life to ask advice on every important matter.  How many mistakes in life would have been prevented if those making them had only asked advice from the proper persons and followed it.  Your parents have traveled the road of life before you.  Now it is known to them and they can point out its dangers.  To you the road is entirely new, and it will be only after you have traveled it and arrived nearly at its end in the latter days of your life that you also will be able to advise others how to pass through it in safety.  This road can be traveled only once, so be advised by those who have learned its many dangers by their own experience.  You should be very glad that those of experience are willing to teach you, and if you neglect their warnings you will be very sorry for it someday.

Lesson 34 FROM THE SEVENTH TO THE END OF THE TENTH COMMANDMENT

373 Q. What is the Seventh Commandment?  A. The Seventh Commandment is:  Thou shalt not steal.

Stealing is one of those vices of which you have to be most careful.  Children should learn to have honest hearts, and never to take unjustly even the smallest thing; for some begin a life of dishonesty by stealing little things from their own house or from stores to which they are sent for goods.  A nut, a cake, an apple, a cent, etc., do not seem much, but nevertheless to take any of them dishonestly is stealing.  Children who indulge in this trifling thievery seldom correct the habit in after life and grow up to be dishonest men and women.  How do you suppose all the thieves now spending their miserable lives in prison began?  Do you believe they were very honest—­never having stolen even the slightest thing—­up to a certain day, and at once became thieves by committing a highway robbery?  No; they began by stealing little things, then greater, and kept on till they made stealing their business and thus became professional thieves.  Again, the little you steal each day does not seem much at the time, but if you put all the “littles” together you may soon have something big, and almost before you know it—­if you intend to continue stealing—­you may have taken enough to make you guilty of mortal sin.  If you intended to steal, for instance, only a small amount every day for the whole year, you would at the end have stolen a large amount and committed a mortal sin.  There are many ways of violating the Seventh Commandment.