land. Do you not know also that the trivial use of God's name results in perjury?

Make the name of God a foot-ball in the community, and it has no power when in court-room and in legislative assembly it is employed in solemn adjuration. See the way sometimes they administer the oath: "S'help you God-kiss the book!" Why is it that so often jurors render unaccountable verdicts, and judges give unaccountable charges, and useless railroad schemes pass in our State capitals, and there are most unjust changes made in tariffs-tariff lifted from one thing and put upon another? May not this be the why?

May not this also be the reason why smuggling, which is always a violation of the oath, becomes in some circles a grand joke? You say to a man: "How is it possible for you to sell these goods so very cheap? I can't understand it." "Ah!" he replies, with a twinkle of the eye, "the Custom House tariff of these goods isn't as much as it might be."

WHAT IS THE CURE?

It is a mighty habit. Men have struggled for years to get over it. An aged man was in the delirium of a fever. He had for many years lived a most upright life, and was honored in all the community; but when he came into the delirium of this fever he was full of imprecation and profanity, and they could not understand it. After he came to his right reason he explained it. He said, "When I was a young man I was very profane. I conquered the habit, but I had to struggle all through life. You haven't for forty years heard me say an improper word, but it has been an awful struggle. The tiger is chained, but he is alive yet."

If you would get rid of this habit, I want you, my friends, to dwell upon the uselessness of it. Did a volley of oaths ever start a heavy load? Did they ever extirpate meanness from a customer? Did they ever collect a bad debt? Did they ever cure a toothache? Did they ever stop the twinge of the rheumatism? Did they ever help

you forward one step in the right direction? Come now, tell me, ye who have had the most experience in this habit, how much have you made out of it? Five thousand dollars in all your life? No. One thousand? No. One hundred? No. One dollar? No. One cent? No. If the habit be so utterly useless, away with it.

You start with a small oath. I saw a man die Voltaire only gradually

Think too how the habit grows. oath, you will come to the large with an oath between his teeth. came to his tremendous imprecation; but the habit grew on him until in the last moment, supposing Christ stood at the bed, he exclaimed, "Crush the wretch! Crush the wretch!"

Remember also, for the cure of this habit, that it arouses God's indignation. Dionysius used to have a cave in which his culprits were incarcerated, and he listened at the top of that cave and he could hear every groan, he could hear every sigh, and he could hear every whisper of those who were imprisoned. He was a tyrant. God is not a tyrant; but He bends over this world and He hears everythingevery voice of praise-every voice of imprecation. He hears it all. The oaths seem to die on the air, but they have eternal echo. They come back from the ages to come. Listen! listen! God very often shows what He thinks, but for the most part the fatality is hushed up. Families keep them still to avoid the horrible conspicuity. Physicians. suppress them through professional confidence. It is a very, very, very long roll that contains the names of those who died with blasphemies on their lips.

A few summers ago, among the Adirondacks, I met the funeral procession of a man who, two days before, had fallen under a flash of lightning, while boasting, after a Sunday of work in the fields, that he had cheated God out of one day anyhow, and the man who worked with him on the same Sabbath is still living, but a helpless invalid, under the same flash.

INSTANCES OF AWFUL PUNISHMENT.

There is not a sin in all the catalogue that is so often peremptorily and suddenly punished in this world as the sin of profanity. At New Brunswick, N. J., just before I went there as a student, this occurrence took place in front of the college. On the rail-track a man had uttered a horrid oath. He saw not that the rail-train was coming. The locomotive struck him and instantly dashed his life out. No mystery about it. He cursed God and died. In a cemetery in Sullivan County, in this State, are eight headstones in a line, and all alike, and these are the facts: In 1861 diphtheria raged in the village, and a physician was remarkably successful in curing his patients. So confident did he become that he boasted that no case of diphtheria could stand before him, and finally defied Almighty God to produce a case of diphtheria that he could not cure. His youngest child soon. after took the disease and died, and one child after another, until all the eight had died of diphtheria. The blasphemer challenged Almighty God, and God accepted the challenge.

But I come later down and give you a fact that is proved by scores of witnesses. In August of 1886 a man got provoked at the continued drought and the ruin of his crops, and in the presence of his neighbors he cursed God, saying that he would cut His heart out if He would come, calling Him a liar and a coward, and flashing a knife. And while he was speaking his lower jaw dropped, smoke issued from mouth and nostrils, and the heat of his body was so intense it drove back those who would come near. Scores of people visited the scene and saw the blasphemer in awful process of expiring.

At Catskill, N. Y., a group of men stood in a blacksmith's shop during a violent thunder-storm. There came a crash of thunder and some of the men trembled. One man said: "Why, I don't see what you are afraid of. I am not afraid to go out in front of the shop and defy the Almighty. I am not afraid of the lightning." And he laid a wager on

the subject, and he went out, and he shook his fist at the heavens, crying, "Strike, if you dare!" and instantly he fell under a bolt. What destroyed him? Any mystery about it? Oh, no. He cursed God and died.

Years ago, in a Pittsburgh prison, two men were talking about the Bible and Christianity, and one of them, Thompson by name, applied to Jesus Christ a very low and vil lainous epithet, and as he was uttering it, he fell. A physician was called, but no help could be given. After a day lying with distended pupils and palsied tongue, he passed out of this world.

On the road from Margate to Ramsgate, England, you may find a rough monument with the inscription, "A boy was struck dead here, while in the act of swearing."

In Scotland a club assembled every week for purposes of wickedness, and there was a competition as to which could use the most horrid oath, and the man who succeeded was to be president of the club. The competition went on. A man uttered an oath which confounded all his comrades, and he was made president of the club. His tongue began to swell, and it protruded from the mouth, and he could not draw it in, and he died, and the physicians said: "This is the strangest thing we ever saw: we never saw any account in the books like unto it: we can't understand it." I understand it. He cursed God and died.

Oh, my brother, God will not allow this sin to go unpunished. There are styles of writing with manifold sheets, so that a man writing on one leaf writes clear through ten, fifteen, or twenty sheets, and so every profanity we utter goes right down through the leaves of the book of God's remembrance.

CHAPTER VII.

Lying, Dishonesty, and Fraud.

"A certain man named Ananias, with Sapphira his wife, sold a possession; . . . . and the young men came in, and found her dead, and carrying her forth, buried her by her husband.”—ACTS 5: 1-10.,

A WELL-MATCHED pair, alike in ambition and in falsehood, Ananias and Sapphira. They wanted a reputation for great beneficence, and they sold all their property, pretending to put the entire proceeds in the charity fund while they put much of it in their own pocket. There was no necessity that they give all their property away, but they wanted the reputation of so doing. Ananias first lied about it and dropped down dead. Then Sapphira lied about it and she dropped down dead. The two fatalities a warning to all ages of the danger of sacrificing the truth.

There are thousands of ways of telling a lie. A man's whole life may be a falsehood, and yet never with his lips may he falsify once. There is a way of uttering falsehood by look, by manner as well as by lip. There are persons who are guilty of dishonesty of speech and then afterward say "may be;" call it a white lie, when no lie is that color. The whitest lie ever told was as black as perdition. There are those so given to dishonesty of speech that they do not know when they are lying.

With some it is an acquired sin, and with others it is a natural infirmity. There are those whom you will recognize as born liars. Their whole life, from cradle to grave, is filled up with vice of speech. Misrepresentation and prevarication are as natural to them as the infantile diseases, and are a sort of moral croup or spiritual scarlatina. Then there are those who in after life have opportunities of developing this