Jane S. came home with her clothes soiled and hands badly torn.
"Where have you been?" asked her mother.

"I fell down the bank near the mill," said Jane, "and I should have
been drowned, if Mr. M. had not seen me and pulled me out."

"Why did you go so near the edge of the brink?"

"There was a pretty flower there that I wanted, and I only meant to
take one step, but I slipped and fell down."

_Moral_: Young people often take but one step in sinful
indulgence [Poor Jane!], but they fall into soul-destroying sins.
They can do it by a single act of sin. [The heinous act of picking a
flower!] They do it; but the act leads to another, and they fall into
the gulf of Perdition, unless God interposes.


Now, quite apart from the folly of this story we must condemn it on
moral grounds. Could we imagine a lower standard of a Deity than that
presented here to the child?

Today the teacher would commend Jane for a laudable interest in
botany, but might add a word of caution about choosing inclined planes
in the close neighborhood of a body of running water as a hunting
ground for specimens and a popular, lucid explanation of the
inexorable law of gravity.

Here we have an instance of applying a moral when we have finished our
story, but there are many stories where nothing is left to chance in