“I admit,” said I, “that you and others similarly situated, are under a grievous temptation.  But honesty, in the long run, is the best policy.  Acting upon the same principles with the gentleman who has detained you, I might hereafter refuse to employ you.  And others might refuse, whose work you are probably engaged to perform, but are postponing to gratify him.  The consequence of all this is, that your promises will soon pass for nothing.  You will be considered as a man not of your word, and when once your good name is lost, you will become poorer than you now are, and remain without employment and without friends.”

No one, it is believed, can read the foregoing incident without being impressed with the great impropriety chargeable upon the gentleman referred to.  The temptation he spread before the poor mechanic was utterly wrong and unbecoming.  It was nothing short of oppression.  It was bringing his wealth to bear upon a point with which it had no legitimate connection.  It was placing self before right; it was a reckless sacrifice of the interests of others for his own gratification.

That such cases are common, is well known; but their frequency is only a proof of the slight regard in which the sacredness of promises is held, and to the violation of which employers frequently contribute by the temptations which they spread, and the coercion which they practice.  We do not justify for a single moment the mechanics and laborers who violate their pledges.  We insist upon it that it is their solemn duty to encounter any and every temporal evil rather than sacrifice truth and conscience; but it is believed they would seldom be guilty of this violation were they not pressed beyond measure by employers.

We must for a moment again advert to parents.  You see, friends, what an evil exists throughout the community.  It is everywhere, and is helping to work the ruin of immortal souls.  It often begins, it is believed, in the family.  Parents are guilty, in the first place, and they early inoculate their children with the evil.  And the infection, once taken, is likely to spread and to pervade the whole moral system.  It enters into other relations of life.  It reaches to other departments of duty, and tends to destroy our sense of obligation to God.  It weakens our regard for promises made to the Author of our being.  In short, this disregard for the fulfillment of sacred promises helps to sap the foundations of moral virtue, and to prepare the soul for a world where falsehood reigns supreme, and where there is no confidence between man and man.

VERITAS.

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Original.

TRIALS.