We hear a lot about it to-day, and the doctors are puzzled because they
do not know how to trace it. But it eats and eats away until some of us
have seen most loathsome forms of it consuming the poor body, while the
life is still there, often in very intense suffering. And the doctors
say, "Take care of the first pimple and have it cut out." Cancer often
starts in a tiny spot or the smallest growth.
Now, the liar is just the same. He starts with lie pimples--just little
white spots on his language tongue, but they grow until they eat away
his best life.
In the East there is a dread disease called Leprosy.
It often begins with a little white spot, which grows and grows until
the body gets rotten, and the poor fellow who has the disease has to be
sent away by himself. And white lies grow and grow until the man
becomes an evil one, who sometimes has to be sent off by himself in a
jail, and the boy is sent off to some industrial home to keep him away
so he cannot hurt others, until he has learned a better way of talking
and living.
Be afraid of a lie!
3. They make people whom you cannot trust, and almost anything else I
would wish for you than to be one who cannot be trusted.
You can't rely on a liar. Not only one who lies with his tongue, but
who acts lies. He gets by-and-by so full of lies that if you try to
lean on him, down you go!
Out in the West, one of the great wheat elevators at Fort William
suddenly slid down into the river, because the foundation was too weak
to hold it up.
And a liar is like that! He is a bad foundation for home or school or
society!
He caves in if any weight is put on him.
Let the girls and boys who study about these foxes watch this bad one,
and be straight and true and upright and strong, so people can be sure
of them.
I like the story I read once of a Scottish schoolboy who was called
"Little Scotch Granite." When the boys were supposed to tell how often
they had whispered in school--and if they had not at all, got a perfect
mark called "Ten"--they got the habit of saying "Ten," even when they
had broken the school rule. Little Scotty came, and although he was
bright and full of fun he would not say "Ten"--although his record got
very low.
But he changed the whole school.
He was always a good sport, but he never would tell a lie to save
himself.
At the close of the term he was away down on the list, but when the
teacher said he had decided to give a special medal to the most faithful
boy in the school and asked to whom he would give it--forty voices
called out together, "Little Scotch Granite!"
*XIII*
*"I CAN'T BE BOTHERED!"*
Did you ever hear any girl or boy say that?
"Sonny, go and do that little job, will you?" "Oh, I can't be
bothered!"
"Johnny, your sister Mary is having a hard time with her home work. Go
and see if you can help her." "Oh, I can't be bothered!"
A load of firewood was dumped at the back gate and Billy, who was lying
kicking up his heels on the porch in the sun, was asked to go and pile
some of it in the cellar. "Oh, I can't be bothered! Wait till Dad comes
home, he'll do it!"
The next door neighbour had a sick baby and Nellie was asked to go to
the drug store for something. Now, Nellie really loved babies and she
was a good little kiddie usually; but she was busy on some ribbons she
was fixing for herself--so busy she forgot to shut the garden gate and
that fox came in and bit one of the flowers off her soul, and she said,
"Oh, don't bother me!"
My, girls and boys, you let that fox loose in your garden, and he'll
make an awful mess of it! He'll chew up the loveliest thing and leave a
wreck!
If he gets abroad in the home or the church or the city, or society,
he'll ruin things without a doubt.
Because:
1. If everybody said that nothing ever would be done to help anybody,
this poor old world would be left so that none of us would want to live
in it.
Of course, I know there is a lot of "bother" that we should not bother
with--the "bother" that your mother means when she says, "Stop bothering
the baby!"--the "bother" that means teasing, and vexing and annoying,
and making yourself a nuisance.
But think where you would have been if your mother and father had never
bothered over you.
Think of where the world would have been if all men and women had
refused to be bothered about its history. It would have had no heroes,
no authors, and no leaders, and what we call history would have been a
perfect mess!
It is because savages do not bother that we have the dark places where
the missionary goes and bothers his soul to help; and if he did not,
there would be no progress; and if he never had gone, you and I would
still be savages!
Whenever you are tempted to say, "Don't bother me!"--just remember and
be glad that it was bothering about things gave you home and friends and
school and all that makes your life worth while!