To Be Sure to BE RIGHT.



IT is quite as important for a man to be right as to think himself right. Sincerity of belief is no substitute for correctness of belief. It is said that the cause of the recent disaster on the Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and St. Louis Railroad was the fact that the watch of the conductor of the freight train was twenty minutes behind time without his knowing it. It had stopped for twenty minutes, and then started again. 

He supposed it had been running all the time, and he shaped his course accordingly. It seemed by that watch that he had ample time to make the next turnout before the passenger-train was due there; but the watch being wrong, all his calculations were at fault, and there was death and suffering to the passengers on the colliding trains in consequence.

There is a great deal of running by false time in this world. Boys and men shape their course by wrong standards, and run to ruin accordingly. They think that the personal habits or the business practices or the opinions and beliefs of certain men before them are surely correct, and they wreck everything on the track, which those men point out as safe beyond a question. They perhaps act conscientiously and do as well as they know how, but that does not make their course a correct one nor preserve them from disaster. It is essential not only that a man should think he is right, but that he should be right. "Take heed, therefore, that the light that is in thee be not darkness," is an injunction which the best intentioned man in the world would do well to heed. Take heed that what you think is fair dealing is not dishonesty; that what you think is the safe course is not the way to ruin. 

Not conscience, but the Bible, is the sure guide of conduct. "There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death." 

Proverbs 14:12


S. S. Times.