What Followed | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jan 25, 1883

What Followed.

Wordsworth, says, "The child is father to the man;" and more than one prison scene and prison memory has illustrated this inevitable link of character between one's earlier and later years. A young man arrested for swindling his employer out of $20,000 sat alone in a criminal's cell, out of which daylight had faded.

Cowering on his hard bed he pictured to himself the world outside, full of warmth and light and comfort. The question came to him sharply--"How came you here? Was it really for stealing that last great sum?"

Yes and no.

Looking back twenty years, he saw himself a school-boy, ten years old. He remembered one lovely June day--with the roses in full bloom over the porch, and the dress his mother wore while at her work, and the laborers in the wheat fields.

Freshest of all he remembered his Uncle John--such a queer, kind, forgetful old man! That very morning his uncle had sent him to pay a bill at the country store, and there were seventy-five cents left, and Uncle John did not ask him for it.

When they met that noon, this boy, now in prison, stood there under the beautiful blue-sky, and a great temptation came. He said to himself, "Shall I give it back or shall I wait until he asks for it? If he never asks, that is his lookout. If he does,--why, I can get it again together."

He never gave back the money.

A theft of $20,000 brought this young man to the prison cell, but when a boy he turned that way years before, when he sold his honesty for seventy-five cents.

That night he sat disgraced, and an open criminal, in his chilly cell. Uncle John was long ago dead. The old home was desolate, his mother broken-hearted. The prisoner knew that what brought him there was not the man's deed alone, but the boy's.

Had the ten-year-old boy been true to his honor, life now would have been all different. One little cheating was the first of many, until his character was eaten out, could bear no test, and he wrecked his manliness and his life.--American Baptist Flag.