He might, indeed, have been a
punctual attendant on his class, and still have fallen into this gross
sin, but it is not at all probable. And it is curious and instructive,
that wherever any inmates of prisons, houses of refuge, or other places
of the kind, are found to have been connected with Sunday-schools, it is
nearly always stated in accompaniment that they attended only
occasionally and rarely.
Again, how much weight is there in Job's remarkable expression (ch.
31:5), _I have made a covenant with my eyes_! The eye, the most active
of our senses, is the chiefest inlet of temptation, and hence the
apostle John specifies "the lust of the eyes" as a leading form or type
of ordinary sins. The lad in the case before us allowed his eye to dwell
on the letter, until the covetous desire to appropriate it had grown
into a fixed purpose. Had he made the same covenant as Job, and turned
his eye resolutely away as soon as he felt the first wrongful emotion in
his heart, the result had been widely different. But he rather imitated
the unhappy Achan, who, in recounting his sin, says, "_When I saw_ among
the spoils a Babylonish garment and two hundred shekels of silver, and a
wedge of gold, _then_ I coveted them." A fool's eyes soon lead his hands
astray.
Here also we see the deceitfulness of the heart. A mere boy of fifteen
years, of good ordinary training, at least in part connected with a
Sunday-school, and not prompted by any urgent bodily necessity, commits
a crime punishable by fine and imprisonment.
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