The Independent Press

The Loss of Early Purity of Character.

Over the beauty of the plum and the apricot, there grows a bloom and beauty more exquisite than the fruit itself—a soft delicate plush that overspreads its blushing cheek. Now if you strike your hand over that, and it is once gone, it is gone for ever, for it never grows but once. Take the flower that hangs in the morning in pearled dew-arrayed as no queenly woman ever was arrayed with jewels. Once shake it so that the beads roll off, and you may sprinkle water over it as carefully as you please, yet it can never be made again what it was when the dew fell silently upon it from heaven! On a frosty morning you may see the panes of glass covered with landscape, mountains, lakes, trees blending in beautiful, fantastic picture. Now lay your hand upon the glass, and by scratch of your finger, or by the warmth of your palm, all the delicate tracery will be obliterated! So there is in youth a beauty and purity of character, which when once touched and defiled, can never be restored; a fringe more delicate than frost-work, and which when torn or broken, will never be re-embroidered. A man who has spotted and spoiled his garments in youth, though he may seek to make them white again, can never wholly do it, even were he to wash them with his tears. When a young man leaves his father's house, with the blessings of his mother's tears still wet upon his forehead, if he once loses that early purity of character, it is a loss that he never can make whole again. Such is the consequence of crime. Its effects cannot be eradicated; it can only be forgiven. It is a stain of blood that we can never make white, and which can be washed away only in the blood of Christ that "cleanseth from all sin!"