a junior partner’s free arm-chair, only that he may utilise his money and keep the house solvent for yet a year or two, utterly unheeding that ere long the grateful beneficiaire must be dragged down with his chief to poverty?  Or, which of us has not had experience of some unjust will, stealing our rights by evil influence?  Or of the seemingly luckless accident killing off our intending benefactor just before that promised codicil?  Or of the ruinous investment?  Or of the bankrupt Life Assurance?  Or of the unhappy fact of your autograph, “a mere matter of form,” on the back of some dishonoured bill of one’s defaulting friend?  Yet all these are providences too,—­lessons of life, and parts of our schools and schoolmasters.

And there are many like social evils besides.  Let me delicately touch one of them.  I desire as an Ancient, now nearing the close of my career, at least in this the caterpillar and soon to be chrysalis condition of my being, to give my testimony seriously and practically to the fact (disputed by too many from their own worse experience) that it is quite possible to live from youth to age in many scenes and under many circumstantial difficulties, preserving still through them all the innocent purity of childhood.  True, the crown of greater knowledge is added to the Man; but although it be a knowledge both of evil and of good, theoretically,—­it need not practically be a guilty knowledge.  If one of any age, from the youngest to the oldest, has not the power of self-control perpetually in exercise, and the good mental help of prayer habitually at hand to be relied on, he is in danger, and may fall into sin or even crime, at any hour, unless the Highest Power intervene.  But, if the senses are trained to resist the first inclinations to unchastity, by the eye that will not look and the ear that will not listen, then the doors of the mind are kept closed against the enemy, and even “hot youth” is safe.

We live in a co-operative cycle of society; and amongst other co-operations are all manner of guilds to encourage, by example, companionship and the like, divers great virtues, and some less important fads and fancies of the day:  let me not be thought to disparage any gatherings for prayer, or temperance, or purity; though individual strong men may not need such congregated help as the weaker brethren yearn for.  Many a veteran now, changed to good morals from a looser life in the past, may well hope to serve both God and man by preaching purity to the young men around, by vowing them to a white ribbon guild, and giving them the decoration of an ivory cross.  But he is apt to forget what young blood is, his own having cooled down apace; anon he will find that Nature is not so easily driven back—­usque recurrit—­and he will soon have to acknowledge that if the higher and deeper influences of personal religion, earnest prayer, honest watchfulness, and sincere—­though it be but incipient—­love of God and desire