HAVE you ever considered the effect of one wrong act? The thing may not seem wrong in itself; soon done and viewed alone, it may appear of no importance. But you must trace its ramifications, and follow up link by link its results. That single insignificant act done thoughtlessly, in an unguarded moment, must send forward an influence through your whole subsequent life. The historian of British India, speaking of the voyage of Warren Hastings to that country, says concerning a circumstance which occurred on that voyage: "It is doubtful whether this act did not exercise an unfavorable influence over his whole moral nature, and over his career." Of how many persons might the same remark be made? One wroug act brings the murderer to his ignominiuou end. One wrong act stamps, with indelible stains of dishonor, a character hitherto above reproach. One wrong act in youth has thrown mauy a youug person from under the controlling love of a kind Providence, and launched him on a sea of trouble and sorrow to a late old age. Of how much peace, of how much spiritual prosperity and holy joy, has a single siu at the outset robbed the child of God? Of how much deep sorrow and mortification has it been the inlet? It was an act, perhaps, so soon done as the turning of a key by the angel that opened the bottomlessless pit; but with a more distressing power for evil it has caused a darkness, as the smoke of a great furnace, to overcloud your prospects, and has let forth amid the wide-spread scenes of all your following years, memories and regrets with a keener power than scorpions, and leaving hardly a green thing in the waste of a life that opened with so much to animate and cheer. It has drawn down on you the displeasure of God. It has arrayed providence against you, and shut you off from the fullness of his love. An unadvised expression from the lips of Moses shut him out from the green pastures and still waters beyond Jordan. Never till we reach heaven, and there have all our secret history unrolled to our view, shall we know from how many scenes of earthly and of spiritual happiness a single wrong act has excluded us; how many sore afflictions it has drawn around our weary pilgrimage; and from what degree of advancement it has shut us off even amid the glories and blessedness of heaven.—Sel.