dermines integrity, it hardens the heart
and debases taste, and is the willing handmaid of other vices. Moral
degradation is its inseparable companion. Therefore, if you mix in it,
or share in it, or give any adhesion or countenance to it, which helps,
as men say, to make it respectable, and so to spread its influence, you
are debasing the moral currency.

Or take another common case. You are familiar with the poet's
description, "And thus he bore without abuse the grand old name of
gentleman." That is a noble thing for any man or boy to have said of
him; and there is not one among you who does not desire always to be able
to claim that name as his own.

But, wherever we go in the world, how many men there are who claim it and
yet debase it by ignoble use! They help to spread the notion that a man
may be a man of low morality and still a gentleman; that his
gentlemanliness may be a mere varnish of culture and manners, a thin
veneering having underneath it only meanness, or coarseness, or
corruption; and that, notwithstanding this, he may still claim to be
called a gentleman. Those who spread such doctrines are debasing the
moral currency of English life. And it should be the mission of schools
like this, and of those who grow up in them, to pour upon all such
persons the contempt which they deserve, and to restore the currency of
common life to something of Christian purity.

Remembering, then, how sensitive the soul is, and how easily by example,
or conduct, or fashion it may be so perverted as to lose its clear vision
and higher aims, its pure tastes and ennobling emotions, we have to make
it our ambition and endeavour that our life may be kept free from such
debasement.

But, if we are to succeed in this, we must make it our daily prayer that
the God of our Lord Jesus Christ will enlighten the eyes of our
understanding, and give unto us the spirit of wisdom and revelation in
the knowledge and love of Him.

XVII. A NEW HEART.

"A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within
you."--EZEKIEL xxxvi. 26.

In the beautiful and suggestive dream of Solomon, which is recorded in
the third chapter of the First Book of Kings, God appears to him, saying,
"Ask what I shall give thee"; and Solomon's answer is, "O Lord, I am but
a child set over this great people, give me, I pray Thee, a hearing
heart." And God said to him, "Because thou hast asked this thing, and
hast not aske