The Topeka state journal. [volume] (Topeka, Kansas) 1892-1980, 1905-07-29
a sATURDAY sERMoN.
Learn to do wen. "-Isaiah III.

Learn to do well. Isaiah Ill.
1t is easy to go wrong if one starts
wrong. After habit of wrong-doing
is formed it is no easy matter to
break it. The boy who starts in life by
stealing little things will be tempted
to steal larger ones when he becomes
a man. The clerk who takes just
few dollars from the till to tide him
over difficulty for a few days is
almost sure to get in deeper and
deeper until he becomes an en-
bezzler-unless he is promptly caught
and punished.
The thing to do is not to start
wrong. Once upon a time young
man just starting in life applied for
a job as a school teacher in an eastern
Kansas county. He got it. With the
opening of school it developed that
some of his patrons needed new school
books, and as he was going to the
county seat some miles away he
offered to buy the books. and the
offer was accepted. When the books
were delivered one patron discovered
that the fyleaf had been removed
from one book and the price marked
on another page. In another book the
price mark had been erased and
marked over. a few days later the
patron went to town himself and in
quired the price of the books. He
discovered that the teacher had raised
the price mark ten cents on each book.
1t was such a small and contempt
ible thing to do that the patron said
nothing about it, but years afterwards
he discovered that the same thing
had happened to other patrons. The
best thing that could have happened
to the young teacher would have been
an exposure that would have taught
him never to do such thing again,
but that didn't happen. The young
teacher was smart and had a way of
making friends, SO in a few years he
was elected county clerk of his
county. Whether he had raised the
price mark on any more books is not
known, but in the county Office he saw
an opportunity to raise the figures on
county warrants. He had been sue
| cessful in raising the price marks on
books ten cents without detection, as
he thought, and he could not resist
the temptation to raise the warrants.
First he raised them only ten dollars,
but as he escaped detection he made
| the increases larger. He served his
term and no one was the wiser.
But the Good Book says, "Be sure
your sin will find you out" and it did
in this instance. Years afterwards, at
an inopportune time. the exposure
came and the former county clerk was
compelled to refund to his county
over thirteen hundred dollars that he
had stolen. But in the meantime he
had been raised to another high po-
sition as assistant in an important
public Office where he had the hand
| ling of large sums of public money.
One day another official discovered
that he had not been credited with a
large sum that he had sent the office.
He asked why. at was credited to
another county by mistake" wrote
the assistant. cit is one of those
things that you cannot explain
! Then came the discovery that there
were shortages amounting to thousands
of dollars in the office with which this
man was connected, and today his name
is a by-word.
Do you suppose this man expected to
be dishonest all his life when he first
cheated his school patrons by raising
the price of those school books ten cents
each? Not at ALL That may or may
not have been his first step in dishon-
esty, but it was probably one of the
first, and it was one of the smallest.
It's the little wrongdoing at the start
that does the mischief. If one never
starts in doing wrong one will never go
wrong. The thing to do is to always be
faithful to your trust and never to start
wrong in even little things. It's the
little wrongs that lead to bigger ones.
The man who started in by raising the
price mark on a school book formed a
habit that caused him to raise a coun-
ty warrant a hundred dollars when he
got a chance. That habit caused him to
misappropriate thousands of dollars a
few years later. The thing to do is to
learn to do right at the start, instead
of wrong.