To do our duty in this world towards God and towards man consistently and steadily, requires the cultivation of all the faculties which God has given to us. And He has given us everything. It is His Will that instructs and guides our will. It is the knowledge of good and evil, the knowledge of what is right and of what is wrong that makes us amenable to man here, and responsible to God hereafter.

   Honesty and truth go well together. Honesty is truth and truth is honesty. Truth alone may not constitute a great man, but it is the most important element of a great character. It gives security to those who employ him, and confidence to those who serve under him. Truth is the essence of principle, integrity and independence. It is the primary need of every man. Absolute veracity is more needed now than at any former period of our history. Indeed, the great need of the world at all times is men of integrity and honesty and truthfulness.

   The truth of the good old maxim that "Honesty is the best policy," is upheld by the daily experience of life,-----uprightness and integrity, being found as successful in business as in everything else. Integrity of word and deed ought to be the cornerstone of all business transactions. To the tradesman, the merchant, the manufacturer, it should be what honor is to the soldier, or charity to the Christian.

   It must be admitted that trade tries character more severely than any other pursuit in life. It puts to the severest tests honesty, self-denial, justice, and truthfulness,-----and men who pass through such trials unstained are perhaps worthy of as great honor as soldiers who prove their courage amidst the fire and peril of battles. And to the credit of the vast multitudes of men engaged in the various departments of trade it must be admitted that on the whole they pass through their trials nobly and well.

   How a man uses money,-----makes it, saves it, and spends it,-----is perhaps one of the best tests of practical wisdom. Although money ought by no means to be regarded as the chief end of life, neither is it a trifling matter to be held in philosophic contempt, representing as it does, to so large an extent, the means of physical comfort and social well being. Indeed, some of the finest qualities of human nature are intimately related to right use of money; such as generosity, honesty, justice and self-sacrifice, as well as the practical virtues of economy and providence.

   On the other hand there are their counterparts of avarice, fraud, injustice, and selfishness as displayed by the inordinate lovers of gain; and the vices of indolence, extravagance and improvidence, on the part of those who abuse and misuse the means entrusted to them. So that a right measure and manner in getting, saving, spending, giving, taking, lending, borrowing, and bequeathing would argue a good and virtuous man.

   Comfort in worldly circumstances is a condition which every man is justified in striving to attain by all honorable and worthy means. It secures that physical satisfaction which is necessary for the culture of the better part of his nature; and it enables him to provide for those of his own household, without which, says the Apostle, he is worse than the infidel. The very effort required to attain success in life with this object in view, is of itself an education; stimulating a man's sense of self-respect, bringing out his practical qualities and disciplining him in the exercise of patience and perseverance. The provident and careful man must necessarily be a thoughtful man, for he lives not merely for the present but with provident forecast makes arrangement for the future. He must also be a temperate man and exercise the virtue of self-denial, than which nothing is so much calculated to give strength to character.

The young man as he passes through life advances through a long line of tempters ranged on either side of him; and the inevitable effects of yielding is degradation in a greater or less degree. Contact with them tends insensibly to draw away from him some portion of the Divine electric element with which his nature is charged; and his only mode of resisting is to utter and act out his " No" manfully and resolutely. He must decide at once, not waiting to deliberate and balance reasons; for the youth like the woman who hesitates, is lost. But temptation will come to try his strength; and once yielded to, the power to resist grows weaker and weaker. Yield once and a portion of your virtue is gone; resist manfully and the first decision will give strength for life, and repeated, it will become a habit.

   We are passing through trying times upon which the seeds of dishonesty have fallen more or less abundantly and are bringing forth fruit in every section of the country and in every class of society. To study the causes of dishonesty will be more beneficial to us than to declaim against this growing evil. To know the causes of dishonesty, to be warned against everything that militates against integrity and uprightness, is in a measure to be armed and protected against this enemy of our souls. In order therefore that we may be on our guard against this insidious foe of right thinking, right doing and right living, we will consider some of the causes and consequent evils of dishonesty. Some men find in their bosom from the very first a vehement inclination to dishonest ways. Knavish propensities are inherent, born with the child and transmissible from parent to son. The children of a sturdy thief, if taken from him at birth and reared by honest men, would doubtless have to contend against a strongly dishonest inclination. Such men become kleptomaniacs, and are fortunately soon discovered and placed where they cannot follow this evil propensity.

   But a child, fair-minded and naturally honest, may become dishonest by parental example. He is early taught to be sharp in bargains and vigilant for every advantage. Little is said about honesty, and much about shrewd traffic, a condition which becomes a family anecdote. Visitors are regaled with the boy's precocious keenness. Hearing the praise of his exploits, he studies craft, and seeks parental admiration by adroit knaveries. He is taught for his safety that he must not range beyond the law; that would be unprofitable. He calculates his morality thus: Legal honesty is the best policy; dishonesty then is a bad bargain and therefore wrong; whatever profit breaks no legal statute-----though it is gained by falsehood, through dishonor, unkindness, and unscrupulous conscience-----he considers fair, and says, the law allows it. Men may spend a long life without an indictable action and without an honest one. No law can reach the insidious ways of subtle craft. The law allows and religion forbids men to profit by others' misfortunes, to prowl for prey among the ignorant, to over-reach the simple, to suck the last life-drops from the bleeding, to hover over men as a vulture over herds, swooping down upon the weak, the straggling and the weary. The infernal craft of cunning men turns the law itself to piracy, and works outrageous fraud even in the court room, by the decisions of judges and under the seal of justice.

   A prolific source of dishonesty is extravagance. Extravagance,-----which is foolish expense, or expense disproportionate to one's means,-----may be found in all grades of society; but it is chiefly apparent among the rich, those aspiring to wealth, and those wishing to be thought affluent. Many a young man cheats his business by transferring his means to theaters, balls, expensive parties and lodges and to the nameless and numberless projects of pleasure. The enterprise of others is baffled by the extravagance of their family; for few men can make as much in a year as an extravagant woman can carry on her back in one Winter. Some are ambitious of fashionable society, and will gratify their vanity at any expense. This proportion between means and expense soon brings on a crisis. The victim is straightened for money; without it he must abandon his rank; for fashionable society remorselessly rejects all butterflies which have lost their brilliant colors. Which shall he choose, honesty and mortifying exclusion, or gaiety purchased by dishonesty? The severity of this choice sometimes sobers the intoxicated brain, and a young man shrinks from the gulf, appalled at the darkness of dishonesty. But excessive vanity, high life, with or without fraud, is paradise and any other life purgatory. Here many resort to dishonesty without scruple. It is at this point that public sentiment half sustains dishonesty. It scourges the thief of necessity, and pities the thief of fashion.

 The struggle with others is on the very ground of honor. A wife led from affluence to rigid poverty, from leisure and luxury to toil and want; a daughter once courted as rich, to be dis-esteemed when poor,-----this is the gloomy project seen through the magic haze of despondency. Honor, love and generosity, strangely bewitched, plead for dishonesty as the only alternative to such suffering. But go, my good man, to your wife; tell her the alternative; if she is worthy of you, she will face your poverty with a courage which shall shame your fears, and lead you into its wilderness and through it, all unshrinking. Many there be who went weeping into this desert, and ere long, having found in it the fountains of the purest peace, have thanked God for the pleasure of poverty. But if your wife unmans your resolution, imploring dishonor rather than penury, may God pity and help you. You dwell with a sorceress and few can resist her wiles.

      Debt, my friends, is an inexhaustible fountain of dishonesty. Debt becomes a rigorous servitude. The debtor learns the cunning tricks, delays, concealments, and frauds by which slaves evade and cheat their masters. He is tempted to make ambiguous statements, pledges with secret passages of escape, contracts with fraudulent constructions, lying excuses and more mendacious promises. He is tempted to elude responsibility, to delay settlements, to prevaricate upon terms, to resist equity, and devise specious fraud. When the eager creditor would restrain such vagrancy by law, the debtor then thinks himself released from moral obligation, and brought to a legal game, in which it is lawful for the best player to win. He disputes true accounts, he studies subterfuges, extorts provocations, delays, and harbors in every nook and corner and passage of the law's labyrinths. At length the measure is filled up, and the malignant power of debt is known. It has opened in the hearts every fountain of iniquity; it has besoiled the conscience, it has tarnished the honor,-----it has made the man a deliberate student of knavery, a systematic practitioner of fraud; it has dragged him through all the sewers of petty passions,-----anger, hate, revenge, malicious folly, or malignant shame. When a debtor is beaten at every point, and the law will put her screws upon him, there is no depth in the gulf of dishonesty into which he will not plunge.

   But craft has another harbor of resort for the piratical crew of dishonesty, viz: putting the property out of the law's reach by a fraudulent conveyance. Whoever runs into debt, and consumes the equivalent of his indebtedness; whoever by folly has incurred debts, and lost the benefits of his outlay; whoever is legally obliged to pay for his malice or carelessness; whoever by infidelity to public trusts has made his property a just remuneration for his defaults, whoever of all these, or whoever, under any circumstances puts out of his hands property, morally or legally due to creditors, is a dishonest man. The crazy excuses which men render to their conscience are only such as every villain makes who is unwilling to look upon the black face of his crimes.

   He who will receive a conveyance of property, knowing it to be illusive and fraudulent, is as wicked as the principal; and as much meaner, as the tool and subordinate of villainy is meaner than the master who uses him.

   There is a circle of moral dishonesties practiced because the law allows them. The very anxiety of law to reach the devices of cunning so perplexes its statutes with exceptions, limitations, and supplements, that like a castle gradually enlarged for centuries, it has its crevices, dark corners, secret holes, and winding passages,-----an endless harbor for rats and vermin, where no trap can catch them. The country is villainously infested with legal rats and rascals who are able to commit the most flagrant dishonesties with impunity. They can do all wrong which is profitable, without that part which is objectionable. The very ingenuity of these miscreants excites such admiration of their skill, that their life is gilded with a specious respectability. Men proffer little esteem for blunt, necessitous thieves who rob and run away; but for a gentleman who can break the whole of God's law so adroitly as to leave man's law unbroken, who can indulge in such a conservative stealing that his fellow men award him a rank among honest men for the excessive skill of his dishonesty,-----for such an one, I fear, there is almost universal sympathy.

   Political dishonesty breeds dishonesty of every kind. It is possible for good men to permit single sins to coexist with general integrity, where the evil is indulgenced through ignorance. Once undoubted Christians were slave traders. They might be while unenlightened, but not in our times. A state of mind that will intend one fraud will, upon occasions, intend a thousand. He that in an emergency will lie, will be supplied with emergencies. The highest wisdom tells us that he who will be unjust in the least will be unjust also in much. Circumstances may withdraw a politician from temptation to any but political dishonesty; but under temptation a dishonest politician would be a dishonest cashier,-----would be dishonest anywhere, in anything. The fury which destroys an opponent's character would stop at nothing if business were thrown down. That which is true of leaders in politics, is true of subordinates. Political dishonesty in voters runs into general dishonesty, as the rotten speck taints the whole apple. A community whose politics are conducted by a perpetual breach of honesty on both sides, will be tainted by immorality throughout. Men will play the same game in their private affairs which they have learned to play in public matters. The guile, the crafty vigilance, the dishonest advantage, the cunning sharpness, the tricks and traps and sly evasions, the equivocal promises and unequivocal neglect of them, which characterizes political action, will equally characterize private action. The mind has no kitchen in which to do its dirty work whilst the parlor remains clean. Dishonesty is an atmosphere; if it comes into one apartment it penetrates everyone. Whoever will lie in politics will lie in traffic; whoever will slander in politics, will slander in personal squabbles. A professor of religion who is a dishonest politician, is a dishonest Christian.

"The genius of our government directs the attention of every citizen to politics. Its spirit reaches the uttermost of society and pervades the whole mass. If its channels are slimy with corruption, what limit can be set to its malign influence? The turbulence of election, the virulence of the press, the desperation of bad men, the hopelessness of efforts which are not cunning but only honest, have driven many conscientious men from any concern with politics. This is suicidal. Thus the tempest will grow blacker and blacker and fiercer. Our youth will be caught up in its whirling bosom and dashed to pieces and its boil will break down every green thing. At God's house the care should begin. Let the hand of discipline smite the leprous lips which shall utter the profane heresy, 'All is fair in politics.' If any hoary professor, drunk with the mingled wine of excitement, shall tell our youth that a Christian man may act in politics by any other rule of morality than the law of God, and that wickedness done for a party is not as abominable as if done for man, or that any necessity justifies or palliates dishonesty in word or deed, let such an one go out of the camp and his pestilent breath no longer spread contagion among our youth. No man who loves his country should shrink from her side when she groans with raging distempers. Let every Christian man stand in his place, rebuke every dishonest practice, scorn a political as well as a personal lie, and refuse with indignation to be insulted by the solicitation of an immoral man. Let good men of all parties require honesty, integrity, veracity, and morality in politics, and there, as powerfully as anywhere else, the requisitions of public sentiment will ultimately be felt.

     "A corrupt public sentiment produces dishonesty. A public sentiment in which dishonesty is not disgraceful, in which bad men are respectable, are trusted, are honored, are exalted, is a curse to the young. The fever of speculation, the universal derangement of business, the growing laxity of morals, is, to an alarming extent, introducing such a state of things. Men of notorious immorality, whose dishonesty is flagrant, whose private habits would disgrace the ditch, are powerful and popular. A man stained with every sin except those which required courage; into whose head a pure thought has not entered for forty years, in whose heart an honorable feeling would droop for very loneliness;-----in evil he was ripe and rotten; hoary and depraved in deed, in word, in his present life and in all his past; evil when by himself and viler when among men; corrupting to the young; to domestic fidelity a recreant; to common honor a traitor, to honesty an outlaw; to religion a hypocrite; base in all that is worthy of man, and accomplished in whatever is disgraceful; and yet this wretch could go where he would, enter good men's dwellings and purloin their votes. Men would curse him, yet obey him; warn their sons against him and lead them to the polls for him. A public sentiment which produces such ignominious knaves cannot breed honest men."

   If the shocking stupidity of the public mind to atrocious dishonesties, is not aroused, if good men do not bestir themselves to drag the young from this foul sway, if the relaxed bands of honesty are not tightened and conscience intoned to a severer morality, our night is at hand, our midnight not far off. Woe to that guilty people that sits down upon broken laws and wealth saved by injustice. Woe to a generation fed upon the bread of fraud, whose children's inheritance shall be a perpetual memento of their father's unrighteousness; to whom dishonesty shall be made pleasant by association with the revered memories of father, brother and friend.

   Absconding agents, swindling schemes and defalcations occurring in such melancholy abundance, have ceased to be wonders and rank with the common accidents of fire and flood. The budget of each week is incomplete without its runaway cashier, defaulter, and swindling post office officials; and as waves which roll to the shore are lost in those which follow on, so the villainies of each fresh week obliterate the record of the last.

   The mania of dishonesty cannot arise from local causes; it is the result of disease in the whole community, an eruption betokening foulness of the blood, blotches symptomatic of a disordered system.

   Financial agents are especially liable to the temptations of dishonesty. Safe merchants and visionary schemers, sagacious adventurers and rash speculators, frugal beginners, and retired millionaires, are constantly around them. Every word, every act, every entry, every letter suggests only wealth,-----its germ, its bud, its blossom, its golden harvest. Its brilliance dazzles the sight, its seductions stir the appetites, its power fires the ambition, and the soul concentrates its energies to obtain wealth, as life's highest and only joy.

    Those who mean to be rich often begin by imitating the expensive courses of those who are rich. They are also tempted to venture, before they have means of their own, in brilliant speculations. How can a young cashier, or clerk pay the drafts of his illicit pleasures, or procure the seed for the harvest of speculation, out of his meager salary? Here first begins to work the leaven of death. The mind wanders in dreams of gain; it broods over projects of unlawful riches, stealthily at first and then with less reserve; at last it boldly meditates the possibility of being dishonest and safe. When a man can seriously reflect upon dishonesty as a possible and profitable thing, he is already deeply dishonest. At times the mind shrinks from its own thoughts, and trembles to look down the giddy cliff on whose edge its thoughts poise, or over which they fling themselves like sporting sea-birds. But these imaginations will not be driven from the heart where they have once nested. They haunt a man's business, visit him in dreams, and vampire-like, fan the slumbers of the victim whom they will destroy. In some feverish hour, vibrating between conscience and avarice, the man staggers to a compromise. To satisfy his conscience he refuses to steal; and to gratify his avarice, he borrows the funds, not openly, not of owners, not from men, but from the till, the safe, the vaults.

   He resolves to restore the money before the discovery can ensue, and pocket the profits. Meanwhile, false entries are made, perjured oaths are sworn, forged papers are filed. His expenses grow profuse, and men wonder from what fountain so copious a stream can flow.

   Let us stop here to survey his condition. He flourishes, is called prosperous, thinks himself safe. Is he safe or honest? He has stolen, and embarked the amount upon a sea over which wander perpetual storms, where wreck is the common fate, and escape an accident; and now all his chance for the semblance of honesty is staked upon the return of his embezzlements, from among the sands, the rocks, and currents, the winds and waves and darkness of tumultuous speculation. At length dawns the day of discovery. His guilty dreams have long foretokened it. As he confronts the disgrace almost face to face, how changed is the hideous aspect of his deed from that fair face of promise with which it tempted him! Conscience and honor and plain honesty now come back to sharpen his anguish. Over-awed by the prospect of open shame, of his wife's disgrace, and his children's beggary, he breaks down, and slinks out of life a frantic suicide.

   Some there are, however, less supple to shame. They meet their fate with cool impudence, defy their employers, brave the court, and too often with success. The delusion of the public mind or the confusion of affairs is such, that while petty culprits are tumbled into prison, a cool, calculating, though unmitigated scoundrel is pitied, dandled and nursed by a sympathizing community.

A sickly sentimentality too often enervates the administration of justice; and the pardoning power becomes the master's key to let out unwashed, unrepentant criminals. They have fleeced us, robbed us, and are ulcerous sores to the body politic; yet our heart turns to water over their merited punishment. A fine young fellow, by accident, writes another's name for his own; by a mistake equally unfortunate he presents it at the bank, innocently draws out the large amount, generously spends a part and absent-mindedly hides the rest. Hard-hearted wretches there are who would punish him for this! Young men admiring the neatness of the affair, pity his misfortune, and curse a stupid jury that knew no better than to send to the penitentiary him whose skill deserved a cashiership.

Bulletins from Stillwater inform us daily what he is doing, as if he were a hero, a Napoleon at St. Helena! At length pardoned, he will go forth again to renewed liberty!
 
If there be one quicker than another, by which the State shall assist crime and our laws foster it, it is that course which assures every dishonest man that it is easy to defraud, easy to avoid arrest, easy to escape punishment and easiest of all to obtain pardon.

   All the bankruptcies of commerce are harmless compared to the bankruptcy of public morals. Should the Atlantic Ocean break over our shores and roll sheer across to the Pacific, sweeping every vestige of cultivation and burying our wealth it would be mercy compared to the ocean deluge of dishonesty and crime which, sweeping over the whole land, has spared our wealth but takes our virtue. What are cornfields and vineyards, what are stores and manufactures, and what are gold and silver and all the precious commodities of the earth, among beasts?-----and what are men bereft of conscience and honor?

   We will forget the past and hope for a more cheerful future. We turn to you, young men! All good men, all patriots, to watch your advance upon the stage and implore you to be worthy of yourselves and of your revered ancestry. You are favored of Heaven, with a free land, a noble inheritance of wise laws, and a prodigality of wealth in prospect; advance to your possessions! May you settle down as Israel of old, a people of God in a promised and protected land, true to yourselves, true to your country and true to your God!

    Surely there is great need of such men in our day, true to themselves and true to God. Such men are, everything taken into account, the best calculated to succeed.

   And such men be they born ever so lowly are God's true gentlemen, men whom all are forced to respect, because they are incapable of meanness, fraud, baseness or untruthfulness.

    "God give us men." 

A time like this demands strong minds,
great hearts, true faith and ready hands;

Men whom the lust of office does not kill;
Men whom the spoils of office cannot buy;
Men who possess opinions and a will;
Men who have honor, men who will not lie;
Men who are honest and true!
Amen. 

* Vide "The Commandments" by Devine and "Self-Help" by Smiles.