The Birmingham age-herald., 1908-01-12

from them. Wise Is the man and the woman and the child who heed the warnings spoken by those they love.
 Those warnings began to come to us way back in our childhood days, when we were surrounded by our brothers and sisters. We now live in a great big world, where we have hundreds, perhaps thousands, of acquaintances. We have daily and hourly dealings with our fellow men. But I want to tell you that in all your business and domestic career as a mature man the besetting sins of your life are not more self evident to your friends than they were to your father, and especial ly to your mother, when you played with your broth hers and sisters in the nursery. You can feel that loving ma ternal eye now boring straight into your heart and finding the flaws there. Even now you can ear her say, John, the reason you took that big apple from your little sister Is because you are selfish, and that Is the besetting sin you must fight all your life" Or she says, John, you are naturally de- ceitful." John, that was the act of a coward" John, the difficulty about you is you are vain and jealous. You hate to hear any one else praised. You are not satisfied unless every one is prasng you.' Though years have passed since your mother uttered those words, yet you know she placed her finger upon the weakest part of your nature. Today, though she is dead, you know that she did her duty to you by showing you your reflection in the looking glass.
 The True Friends Criticism.
 Time passed, and you entered the great wide world, and you began to Col r,,Ir were held up to deceive you. There gathered about you lot of sycophants and social vampires. These toadies praise you and fawn over you and flat ter you. When they are away from you they make fun of you and talk about your weaknesses. An old Span 1sh proverb says, "The absent are all ways wrong" so you are always wrong to them when you are absent. But when these hangers on are with you they have nothing but words of praise for you and your wonderful deeds. But, thank God, though there are many who talk against you when you are ab- sent, there are few noble friends who will criticise your faults to your face. They will come up and lay their hands lovingly on your shoulders and say, Charlie, I would not do that Or they say, Charlie, you have on evil habit on you now, and it is eating all the honesty and nobility and purity out of your heart, and you must stop or you will ruin yourself" You may laugh off those warnings and forget them or you may get angry at your true friends, but the friends who are lifting the looking glass before you and showing your imperfections are your true friends. Will you heed these warnings? Will you correct those weaknesses of your character? Are all the glorious opportunities of your life to be ruined by that one flaw in your nature which your friends have pointed out but which you neglect to rectify?
 But there is another reflecting mirror held up before our eyes. That is the mirror with which our enemies delight to show our delinquencies to ourselves and to the world. It is mirror into which most of us look with flashing eye and flushed cheek. But it is refecting mirror which ought to be as helpful for our moral and spiritual de- velopment as the one which our friends upIift. This mirror has a way of mag nifying and intensifying our weak nesses. Like the caricature, it has way of making prominent the flaws of our nature. and yet at the same time making it very plain for whom the portrait was intended.
 Hogarth's Pen.
 These enemies do with the refiecting mirrors what William Hogarth did with his brush and pen. Have you ever been in the museums where they had one room filled with concaVe ana convex mirrors? You stand before one mirror, and you seem to be llttle sh ort fat man about four rect hlgh and weighing at least 400 pounds. Then you look into anoth CT mirror, and m stead of being a little short, lat man, now you will be 12 feet tall ana about as wide as a match. Yet, tall and thin, short and fat, you can see in those concave and convex mirrors the same eyes, lips, hands and hair So our enemies in life take us ana pull us ont or shove us in and twist up all out of shape in order to magnify our faults; but, though they expose our errors with unfailing skill. we stlll re- tain enough of our original serves to let the world know who we are ana what we have done. And today for our own benefit they are lifting up the refecting mirrors for us to have q good look at our errors and fmperIec- tions. ,,,1
 Rut there is still another way in whlch we can see our reflections in the mirrors of our imperfect lives. That IS when we stand surrounded by the tragedles ana the misfortunes resulting from the HIS takes of our past. These mislor.unoe have their stories to tell, just the same as successes have their stories 10 tell. Though some men may achieve success in spite of glaring faults in thelr make up. yet few men ever come to iailure unless that failure is the result Of some folly or sin which if it had been dis- cerned in time, could have been rectlheu And the man who is not willing to see his faults by his failures is man Wno is blind indeed and who will not De taught bv the sternest and yet best of all teach CTS.
 Child Playing With Fire.
 Here. for instance, is little child. He will persist in playing with fire. One day ont in the back yard near to the farm he Is gathering the leaves and starts them in A flame. The farm hand gets there just in time to scatter the leaves and save all the hay which had been stored away in the loft. Next day the boy is playing with matches in the nursery and in a flash of whole pox goes OH, but the older sister throws them out or the window in time to save the iace cur tains. The mother has warned the lttle hoy and fold him the danger, but no good results.
 "All right" says the father, that boy must be taught what fire really is. He must learn by an experience he Will re- member" So when the boy is about 10 touch the hot stove his father does not interfere The boy burns his hand ana screams with pain. The mother IS Tn tears. The father is in tears. But the boy has learned his lesson. He now