d. He did not want his farm divided by the railroad, so
the case went into court, where commissioners were appointed to pay
the damages and to allow the road to be built. One dark night after
the tracks were laid, a train was thrown off the track, and several
were killed. This man was suspected, was tried and found guilty, and
was sent to the penitentiary for life. The farm was soon cut up into
city lots, and the man became a millionaire, but he got no benefit
from it. Before he died, the chaplain told me that he became a child
of God. It may not have taken him more than an hour to lay the
obstruction on the railroad, but he was over thirty years reaping
the result of that one act!

In the history of France we read that a certain king wanted some new
instrument to torture his prisoners with. One of his favorites
suggested that he should build a cage, not long enough to lie down
in, and not high enough to stand up in. The king accepted the
suggestion; but the first one put into the cage was the very man who
suggested it, and he was kept in it for fourteen years. It did not
take him more than a few minutes, perhaps, to suggest that cruel
device; but he was fourteen long years reaping the fruit of what he
had sown.

If a man could do his reaping alone, it would not be so hard; but it
is terrible when he has to make that godly father, and that mother
who loves him, or that wife and family, reap along with him. Does
not the drunkard make his wife and children reap a bitter harvest?
Does not the gambler make his relatives reap? Does not the harlot
make her parents reap agony and shame? What a bitter enemy is sin!
May God help each one of us to turn from it at once!

Whenever I hear a young man talking in a flippant way about sowing
his wild oats, I don't laugh. I feel more like crying, because I
know he is going to make his gray-haired mother reap in tears; he is
going to make his wife reap in shame; he is going to make his old
father and his innocent children reap with him. Only ten or fifteen
or twenty years will pass before he will have to reap his wild oats;
no man has ever sowed them without having to reap them. Sow the wind
and you reap the whirlwind.

We cannot control our influence. If I plant thistles in my field,
the wind will take the thistle-down when it is ready, and blow it
away beyond the fence; and my neighbors will have to reap with me.
So my example may be copied by my children or my neighbors, and my