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                                Young Men

                          WM. GUEST, F. G. S.,
                         REV. J. D. WELLS, D. D.

                         American Tract Society
                                New York




TO

GEORGE WILLIAMS, ESQ.

TREASURER OF THE LONDON ASSOCIATION,

AND

TO THE VARIOUS MEMBERS OF THE YOUNG MEN’S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATIONS IN THE
UNITED KINGDOM AND AMERICA:


To you I beg to offer the four following addresses—they may be helpful
in your service for young men. Thousands there are who watch your
Associations with deep and grateful interest. By some persons, it may
be, your aims are misunderstood. I have never learned that you condemned
other literary and recreative associations; but you have felt that there
was room for one distinctively Christian. You do not frown on joy and
pastime; you do not disparage literary education; but you have not been
ashamed to avow that your object is to save young men from irreligion,
and to promote among yourselves spiritual and Christian culture. To not
a few it therefore appears that not only are your associations among the
very noblest, but that they preëminently meet the demand of these times.
Reading-rooms and opportunities for social enjoyment are doubtless most
desirable, but it is true piety that is the safety and mainspring of
prosperity to a community.

To the best and most distinguished men of this era it seems that the
stability and progress of the great Christian nations depend upon the
maintenance of Christianity in its integrity, and as honestly derived
from the supernatural teaching of the New Testament Scriptures. We
have, however, come upon an age of the gravest perils. What has been
the spring-head and occasioner of these perils? This: Men have become
estranged from intercourse with God, and from the thoughts of the holy
and spiritual world. No longer living in believing relation to the Father
of their spirits, they have lost the light whereby all things become
luminous and harmonized. Three errors now lay straight in their path;
and to one or other of these, according to temperament, they have been
drawn: materialistic worldliness, that inclines man’s whole attentions
to the interests, pleasures, and gains of the world of sense; scientific
atheism, whereby a small minority, happily, of scientific expounders
attempt to bow God out of his universe, and to resolve all creation into
spontaneous life and self-development; intellectual rationalism, that
makes man his own savior, denies sin and atonement, moral weakness and
Divine grace. It would appear as if Satan’s last and deadliest assault
upon the hopes and progress of the race was to be the denial of the
self-existent God. Assuredly, let the control of this belief go, and
this vital consciousness be lost, and the wide floodgates of iniquity
and of lawlessness will be opened, and nothing can save millions from
relapsing into barbarism. Even Mr. Buckle has taught that a materialistic
philosophy led the way to the horrors of the French Revolution. At such
a time, then, as this, Christian associations, with objects so clearly
defined, and where arrangements are primary to secure intercourse with
Christ and with a spiritual world, meet the deepest want of the age.
Moreover, who so well as young men can work among the young? You know
the snare that is spread for their feet; “the cup that is poisoned
and reached out for their hand; the eye that glares death which is
fixed upon them in secret.” Every good man must, therefore, wish you
encouragement in your labor to save and ennoble your companions. You
are blessing your country and your times. Your work will be fruitful
and abide. Thousands who now do not understand you will afterwards
pour benedictions over your memories. You, in an age of speculative
and moral dangers, will be held to have been benefactors. The days are
surely coming when above all other days men will be needed who, by their
Christian enlightenment and sanctity, can impart steadiness and elevation
to their times. Then the men to whom the age will turn will be men with
hearts and understandings which have been animated by Christian faith. To
secure such a generation is your high aim. May God prosper your purpose
and your devotion.

To you, then, I dedicate my little book, which attempts to portray some
of the aspects of modern life, and some of the alarming and imperilling
temptations with which modern habits and modes of opinion are surrounding
young men.

The first lecture was printed in a separate form; but as the whole
edition has been disposed of, it has been thought better to let it now
appear with the others.

                                                                    W. G.

LONDON: CANONBURY PARK.




LIFE: HOW WILL YOU USE IT?


The following words are addressed to young men by one who, not very long
ago, was one of them. If they are serious and earnest, they are non the
less sympathetic and brotherly.

On the mind of some thoughtful men there is the fear that England has
seen her best days, that her sun is going down, and that a decline like
that of other great nations has begun. This is probably the language
of mere pessimists. Albeit, even hopeful men have reason enough to be
anxious. There is a frost of skepticism touching the young mind of
England. There is a dread of enthusiasm which bodes ill. Young men stand
in our great cities amid juggling expedients, glittering pretences,
specious deceits, unscrupulous graspings after wealth or position the
tides of temptation flow fast around them; a high civilization has made
wickedness very facile and seductive; veteran experts in vice are found
everywhere, and the very streets are allowed to be fevered walks of
lustful solicitations.

If England is to be saved and is to have a great future, it will be
through her young men. They are the hope of society. A man, therefore,
who is indifferent to their moral dangers and welfare is no friend to his
country. I will make, then, no apology while I speak to them earnestly of
their life, and what it may be and can be. No doubt there are scores of
empty and frivolous young men who can never be won to thoughtfulness. May
God help them; for the look-out that is before them is awful. But there
are many of a different stamp, and may their Father and mine help me to
articulate his yearning thoughts about them.

My brother, I am not about to speak to you of what belongs to others, nor
mainly of the duties you owe to others; but of what you imperatively owe
to yourself, and what emphatically belongs to you. You have an existence
in which the grandest and the most terrific possibilities are wrapped up.
Life has been given to you. What significance is in the word! Life, with
its unknown treasures and vast capabilities; life, with all its resources
and opportunities; life, with all its rich enjoyments and pleasurable
unfoldings; life, endowed with consciousness and divine faculties; life,
which beginning with the sweetness of infancy, and passing through the
open-heartedness of school days, can ripen into a beauty and strength
and force of goodness which, through the long ages of immortality, will
find accessions of ever-augmenting felicity, power, and blissfulness.
My brother, when I discourse to you of the value of this transcendent
gift of life, exaggeration is hardly possible. No language of men or
angels can worthily set forth the full meaning of this gift. You, among
creatures, are obviously destined to rank with the noblest on the basest
of beings; the elevation with which you come into the universe is the
measure of the grandeur to which you may rise, or the degradation to
which you may fall.

The question therefore comes, What do you intend to do with this your
life? You have come to an age when this question confronts you. You
ignore your rationality by evading it. The two paths of honor and
dishonor are now before you: which do you intend to take? I put the
inquiry in this form—What will you do with your life?—because millions
of men have been ruined, not so much through wrong intention as through
want of thought. They have drifted into an evil course through a passive
unthinkingness. It is not that they have resolved to do bad things,
but they have not resolved to do good ones. Instead of being masters
of themselves, sad to say, they have not even belonged to themselves.
On their forehead might have been once written, “We are open to become
the possession of whatsoever shall make capture of us.” Instead of
controlling, they have been borne along by outward things, like a little
boat in a dangerous stream, not carefully rowed and guided, but empty,
and inviting any unskilled or wicked hand to become its master.

There are young men possessing all the capacities for a dignified and
manly conduct theirs, through the hard industry of others, are all the
qualifications of education and competence. They are surrounded with
circles offering every facility to happiness and pure enjoyment. And what
do these young men do with all this wealth of possession? I will sketch a
few of the courses into which they permit themselves to be seduced. One,
just out of his teens, affects a manly superiority; calls “the governor”
slow; orders his tailor to make garments in a “fast” fashion; cultivates
an elegant beard; secures a massive chain, and if possible, a splendid
ring. His boots are a very important item to his manliness; and then what
deliberation upon the color of his gloves, and the flexibility of his
cane! As he steps from the door of his plodding father, he puts a finish
to his appearance by lighting a cigar, and with a hat à la mode, walks
out, a ready prey for the painted woman, and an advertisement for men on
the look-out for unsophisticated manhood. I do not say that a young man
may not have a gold chain, and trousers made in the height of fashion,
if he likes—there is no religion in not having these things; but for the
sake of all that is manly, do not let a young man think that this is
to make a worthy use of life—to be a show thing to be looked at in the
streets.

But a young man may have higher aims; he may be somewhat literary in his
tastes; may have studied rules of etiquette, and may select associations
that are irreproachable. He permits his vanity, however, to grow into
a chronic craving for admiration. He affects insensibility to attract
attention; falls into the modern fashion of a supercilious apathy;
looks unimpassioned under the most eventful circumstances, and twirls
the points of his moustache with elegant _nonchalance_. Repudiating all
domestic and common interests, he becomes valueless to humanity. The most
beautiful emotions of man’s nature become frigid. His self-absorption
grows into a conceit which relieves others from the duty of considering
him. He never blesses, is never blessed. Ineffective in youth, unloved in
manhood, he becomes testy and splenetic in old age, and dies at length
unmissed and unmourned. And this is all he has made of a life that once
bore so much of promise.

There is another, over whom my heart’s affections linger with a longing
solicitude: I mean the clever and facetious young man. He has quick
parts, can sing well, or give recitations; ever on the look-out for fun,
he heaps up accumulating stores of witticisms and repartee; and can
repeat in character, Mrs. Caudle, Mrs. Brown, or the newest offering of
this literary school. No circle of his friends is complete without him;
the evening party must be delayed if he is engaged; every body likes
him—young men and ladies alike call him “such a good fellow.” And there
is much that is good in him—his readiness and ability to make hours of
recreation brighter are not to be despised; but his kind-heartedness and
endowments fit him for something grander than to be a man who merely
amuses society. He himself suffers loss; neglect of solid reading and of
elevated thoughts lowers his own tone; the moral which he tacks on to the
end of his recitation fails to clear the balance-sheet of his conscience
in better hours; the very friends that he has charmed will seek another
than him in the important moments of their life. He will find himself set
aside ere long; his influence will die with the vivacity of youth; he has
no acquirements that are cared for to carry into riper manhood; and then
nothing is more revolting than the merely farcical and comic old man.
This is all _he_ has made of life; he has been the butterfly for sunny
hours, and has gone out when sterner days came.

Would that my descriptions might cease here; but the tale of failure has
not run out. There are young men with the pathway of honor open before
them, but who turn from it, and in pompous dash care for none of the
things that would make for their peace. Like dogs kept hungry, that their
scent after the game may be keener and more impelling, they slip the
leash of what they term their “mother’s apron-string,” and burst upon
life with a dare-devil spirit that defies control. The shades of evening
find them prowling under the mask of darkness after every pernicious
gratification. Their imaginations have been polluted with the vile
literature secretly circulated. From the dice or billiard-table they go
to the lighted hall, where prostitutes decked in fine apparel mingle in
the waltz and ply their miserable arts, and thence to the house where I
will not follow, and of which the Scriptures say, that “is the way to
hell, going down to the chambers of death.”

A young man in a London warehouse was solicited to spend such a night as
I have glanced at. He refused. “What a fool you are to be so dull,” said
the tempter. “We’ll wait a while and see who is the fool,” said the young
man. In ten years’ time the tempter was in a dishonored grave, and the
other was rising to affluence.

You young men who sneer at religion as weakness and call godliness
hypocrisy, it is you who are the hypocrites. You have risen many a
morning after a night of sin, and have felt how satiety and loathing were
making deep footprints in your nature. You have seen the shamelessness
and hollowness of wickedness, and have been too cowardly to say that you
saw it. You have laughed at virtue while you were bearing agonies in your
flesh which were horrible and indescribable. In ten years the tempter I
have spoken of was in his grave; and if the brief life and dreadful end
of thousands of young men in England could be portrayed, it would be the
most awful tragedy ever told. Men would be horrified as they read it, and
the ghastly memory would haunt them for years. Ah, men do not know it.
These young men go from the great cities to die in country homes, or they
lie solitary in the upper chambers of lodging-houses in back streets.
Angel sisters are kept from sights which they could not comprehend.
Nurses shrink from the foul and loathsome atmosphere. And this is what
they have made of life—a murdered manhood; not living out half their
days: a past all loss, a future all blackness. Oh, where are our tears
if they do not fall over numbers who are dying every day in such chambers
and with such demons of remembrance?

I have read somewhere of an eagle in the Far West. Soaring with steady
wing, he saw far below him the grand scenes of American nature, clothed
in the first snows of early winter. As he rose higher towards the blue
heaven, his keen eye saw floating on the distant river, whose margin
was already frost-bound, the carcass of a huge buffalo. He paused in
his upward flight; descended to settle and revel on this feast of
corruption. He was borne calmly down the stream towards the fall and the
rapids which lay below. Gorged with his foul meal, with drooping wing
and dormant energies, he slept on the fœtid mass, and amid the oozing
putrefaction. The blood, stiffened by the frost, bound his feet to the
remains of the carcass; and onwards was he borne until the roar of the
cataract thundered on his ear. He struggled for liberty; his powers had
been enfeebled with satiety; his drooping wings were bound to the frozen
blood; his wild cries awoke the echoes; he made frantic efforts to throw
off his horrid companion; looked up to the blue heaven he had abandoned.
It was too late: hurried over the rapid, he was sucked into the boiling
cataract, and dashed to destruction on the rocks beneath. How does such
an illustration find its analogy in human life! “His own iniquity,”
saith the Scripture, “shall take the wicked himself, and he shall be
holden with the cords of his sins.” There is a deep and awful mystery
in the downward progress of souls, when he who once was the master of
sin becomes the “slave of sin.” Alas, there are scores of men in every
neighborhood who would give all they have to begin life again. There was
a time when they never intended to be vicious; but step by step they
lowered themselves. Shame, truth, self-respect died. The lower elements
of their nature first were freely indulged, then became importunate, then
exacting, then domineering, then uncontrollable.

Dear young man, the pride of a mother, the hope of a father, with an
intensity of yearning love I conjure you to pause ere you go into the
way of sinners. If your feet have turned aside, retrace, I beseech you,
your steps. Your strong “I will” now, may, through God’s mercy, turn you
from the pit of infamy. But soon weaker will be your will, dimmer your
sense of moral beauty, more desperate your passions, till at length you
will feel bound, and then find yourself borne over the rapids a lost and
helpless wreck.

But our view of life demands other considerations than those that relate
to time and personal dishonor. It is a grand thing to live. A thousand
times have I blessed God for this great gift of life. But it is serious
also. Life has its _responsibilities_. Influence, like all things else,
is imperishable. Nothing perishes. The leaves of autumn do not perish;
they enrich the earth. The fuel of our fires sends curling upwards its
light smoke, which bears its properties for other uses. The broken
fragments of the mountains, through torrent and tempest, nourish plants
and renovate the earth. Not an act you perform, not a word you speak,
can wholly perish. It was probably this that Jesus Christ meant when he
spoke of the idle words for which we shall give account at the day of
judgment; that is, our words which go from us as light as air may be
making others better or worse, and carrying forward their consequences to
the judgment. Sin is imperishable. Sin, like the soul, has immortality
stamped on it: when once done, _it cannot be undone_. Even a saved man’s
sins are imperishable in the consequences. David, the king of Israel,
sinned; alas, how pitilessly! He repented, and poured out a psalm of
contrition that has ever since been the liturgy of humbled souls, and
every verse of which seems vocal with a groan; but he could not undo
the sin. In his own days the enemies of truth blasphemed through him,
and since that time, in every generation, wicked men have encouraged
themselves in wickedness because of that great crime, and the atheist has
barbed his arrow in the blood of that murder. Voltaire, when he came to
die, longed that his blasphemies against Christ should be expunged from
his writings. Ah, he wished what was impossible. His errors led to all
the horrors of the French Revolution, and have shattered the peace of
thousands since. A drunkard may obtain forgiveness; but his example may
have taught his own son to brutalize himself. A young man may turn away
from the evil courses he followed; but he may leave the silly youth whom
he first tempted to go floating down to the bottomless pit.

There is a thought that often appals me. It is nothing, as it seems,
for the seducer to play upon innocence, to instil poison into her sweet
affections and her maidenly instincts. He has done, as he thinks, a manly
thing when he has crumpled up the beautiful flower of her chastity, and
left it to be fouled in the mire. Ah, hard is the father’s shame and the
brother’s scorn she bears. Cold are the streets that she treads at night,
and lonely is the garret where she soon lies down to die. What cares he?
Perhaps in a beautiful home he has forgotten her and her child. His turn
comes at length to die. If conscience puts in a reminder, he calls the
deed an “indiscretion” of his youth, which signifies little. O man, it
_shall_ signify; as sure as there is a God in heaven, thou shalt meet
again that lost one to whom thou didst open the door of shame, of infamy,
and of ruin. Her own lips shall tell thee how thou didst help to put out
in her all that is pure, and to send her into the streets an outcast. It
_shall_ signify; that child of neglect shall claim thee as its father—an
unerring finger shall point it to thee. Before God and holy angels it
shall tell thee of its bare infant feet on snowy street-flags, of night
watchings at omnibus steps, and of the ignorance, and wretchedness, and
foul examples, through which its struggling life was passed, and which
left it no chance of virtue. From thee it shall demand account of those
paternal duties which thou didst incur and didst never discharge. Yes, it
shall signify. Oh, there is a solemn irony of Scripture when it saith,
“Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth; and let thy heart cheer thee in the
days of thy youth, and walk in the ways of thy heart, and in the sight
of thine eyes; _but know thou, that for all these things God will bring
thee into judgment. Therefore remove the cause of sorrow from thy heart,
and put away evil from thy flesh_.”[1]

Would that my address to young men could be in a happier and more joyous
tone. But life has such a tragic side to multitudes in our epoch, that
I am compelled to deal with the causes of this failure and misery. It is
imperative that the ground be cleared of the hinderances before I can
offer, in subsequent lectures, the stimulus and encouragement. One other
reflection, therefore, on account of its infinite import, I am bound
to present. This brief existence of yours, my brother, is giving the
coloring to immortality. The endless life beyond the grave will take its
character from what you are now. You are the child of eternity; you have
now your time of probation; you have your one earthly life to live, and
upon what you make it will depend all that will follow through the ages
of immortality. Every sinful habit you form here may cling like a leprosy
to the soul there; every depraved passion you nourish here may perpetuate
its black defilement there. “The child is father to the man,” saith the
proverb. A young man of sense knows that he will be as a master what he
made himself as an apprentice; and as a man, what he made himself as a
youth. He knows, too, that character is not built up by one or two, but
by the constant series of actions. So the daily thoughts and acts of your
earthly life are forming your character for the vast existence of which
you are an heir, and which lies beyond the grave.

The late Archbishop Whately, in some annotations on Lord Bacon’s second
essay, has mentioned a very remarkable phenomenon connected with
insect-life, and has recorded that it often occurred to him as a very
impressive analogy of a future state. You know that every butterfly—the
Greek name for which, it is remarkable, is the same that signifies also
the soul, Psyche—comes from a caterpillar—in the language of naturalists,
called a larva, which signifies, literally, a mask. Now there is a tribe
of insects called ichneumon-flies, which inhabit and feed on these larvæ.
The parasitical flies have a long, sharp sting, which pierces the body of
the caterpillar, and whereby they deposit their eggs on the inward parts
of their victim. But, strange to say, the caterpillar thus attacked goes
on feeding, and apparently thriving quite as well as those that have
escaped. But when the period arrives for the close of the larva-life,
then the evil is made manifest. Caterpillars assume the pupa-state from
which they emerge butterflies; and it is then that the difference appears
between those that have escaped the parasites and those that were the
victims of them. Beautiful and awful analogy! There are many who, as to
the outside, look like other men. They dress well, look well. The sin is
preying only on their immortal part; and when they have laid aside that
which merely belonged to their physical life, then the soul shall stand,
with all its poverty and scars and shrivelled places, naked and open.
“The kingdom of heaven is within you,” said Christ to his followers; and
so are the elements of hell in other men.

Prodigious is the inconsistency of some modern reasoners. They believe in
the immortality of the soul. They see that the man is the development of
the boy, and that the acts of the youth leave their impress on the whole
after-life. They say law is inflexible, and that miracles therefore
are impossible. They affirm that justice is so exact that its penalty
must fall on its proper victim, and that therefore Christ’s death is not
vicarious. But somehow at this point all their reasoning falls to pieces.
According to them, man in the future life is not to be dealt with after
this inflexibility of law and this exactness of justice. According to
them, up to the moment of death law goes in a straight, unbending line;
why then, in the name of all pretence of reason, does it fail at that
point, so that wickedness, which has met with its exact punishment in
this world, fails to meet with it in that coming one? Dear young man,
fearlessness as to what that future may be is stark madness. It is folly
for which there is no name, for a man all through his earthly life to
bear the traces of the indolence and self-willedness of his youth. But
oh, what must it be for all the future and eternal life to bear the
traces of the wrongs that have been done to the soul in this? What must
it be for all the possible features with which the soul entered on this
life—truth, purity, love, faith—not only to have lain undeveloped, but
to have been quenched? Let me conjure and entreat you to look at this
subject. Do not, for the sake of all that is dear to you, close your eyes
to it. Let the great future take its right place as you are starting in
life. Be assured that the language of Scripture concerning those that
have perished is prompted by God’s yearning for your immortal well-being,
while it accords with all the analogies of creation: “For that they hated
knowledge, and did not choose the fear of the Lord, _therefore shall they
eat the fruit of their own way, and be filled with their own devices_.”

Come then, young men, and let me persuade you to a worthy view of life.
God meets you as you read these words, and offers to be the guide of
your human life. The good God did not send you into his creation to
be afterwards an accursed thing in the outer darkness. This life of
yours, with its endowments and capabilities, may become a sublime and
influential life—a blessed ascendency, a tower of strength to men,
regnant in all that is majestic, angelic, and godlike. Hear how Divine
counsel speaks to you: “How long, ye simple ones, will ye love folly?
Turn you at my reproof: _behold, I will pour out my Spirit upon you; I
will make known my words unto you_.” Nor will life thus passed be too
earnest to be happy. Yours will be the happiness—not of animal enjoyments
merely, not purchased with stabbing your self-respect, not followed with
the heart-sobs of those who love you, but of one who is bringing into use
the higher and diviner faculties of your nature. Your intelligence will
be fed by knowledge, your soul will be ennobled by purity, your tastes
will be in harmony with sweet sounds and beauty, your conscience will
be kept in peace, and your heart’s emotions will have play in ways that
leave no bitterness, but ofttimes swell into rapture. Believe me, the
only thing that can give meaning and glory to your life is, to resolve
most resolutely that you will not be enslaved, will not be degraded,
will not be plunged into the mire and foulness of sin, but will live
according to a life-plan of real nobleness. Remember, no one can do this
for you. Your life is in your own hands; and God has so placed you
among creatures, that _He_ will not do you saving good _without your
consent_. You may be a poor waif on the winds of temptation, drifted to
whatever abyss of destruction they hurry you; or you may be a son of God,
victorious over sin, ranking with the earth’s great ones, and followed
with blessings. And then, and then, when the final issue comes, and you
lie down to die, instead of regrets, yours may be the solid satisfaction
that your life, from its very morning, has been consecrated to the
side of goodness; and then, instead of a place with the wicked and the
scorners, you may go into a heaven for which you are prepared, and into a
life of glorious felicity that is to come, and into which you have been
initiated down here.

Blessed be God, there is a short way to the life I recommend. There
are two steps by which you may enter it. Obtain, first, forgiveness
for the sins of the past. God offers you all the merits of Christ’s
atoning sacrifice. Through that great sacrifice he will receive you, and
_remember_ your sins no more. In the blessed book, in every variety of
form, in every glowing and rich expression, are you assured that pardon
shall be granted to a repentant soul. Young man, this is the first step.
Believe, and drop your burden of the sins of the past. Start a free man.

This is the second step: offer your life gratefully, lovingly, to the
Friend and Saviour of your soul. Ask for his Spirit to help you: his ear
will be swift to hearken. This love to him will make his yoke easy, will
make the cross light, will make life to have a magnificent meaning, will
make sorrow to wear a friendly guise, will break the force of temptation,
will make sin the hateful thing. This will cause your feet to find “peace
and pleasantness” on the path of life, till you reach the mansions where
the golden gates shall be thrown open for you, and the angels shall tell
you they have been waiting to welcome you.

Brother, will you try this life?




SKEPTICAL DOUBTS: HOW YOU MAY SOLVE THEM.


My object in this address is, to relieve the doubts on religious
subjects which meet a young man on setting out in life. Such doubts have
been very common. Nor is it to be wondered at. With some, to doubt is
constitutional. They are not able to give easy credence to any tidings.
With others, the very stupendousness of religious subjects causes the
mind to pause in doubtfulness; the revelations of Christianity are so
transcendent, that thought wavers before their very grandeur. There may
be doubt, yet again, from those appalling miseries of human life which it
is the mission of Christianity to heal; and no less from the strangely
unchristian lives of Christian men. All such doubts are to be treated
tenderly. There are thousands of such doubters among young men at this
hour; and they are not to be denounced, but helped.

On the other hand, you will, I trust, agree with me, that there is
a pretence of doubting which is the simple outgrowth of flippant
indifference or conceit. We hear Tennyson quoted, that there “lives
more faith in honest doubt, than that in half the creeds.” Let me,
however, remind you, that Mr. Tennyson did not mean _resting_ in doubt;
he meant an “honest doubt,” that was bent upon inquiry, and was open to
conviction. He therefore speaks in this same passage of one:

    “He fought his doubts, and gathered strength;
      He would not make his judgment blind;
      He faced the spectres of his mind,
    And laid them: thus he came at length

    “To find a stronger faith his own,
      And power was with him in the night
      Which makes the darkness and the light,
    And dwells not in the light alone.”[2]

Observe, a great character is not built up by doubting. There is
weakness, not strength, in doubts. Nor is it necessarily a mark of
intelligence to doubt. Any scanty mind may doubt, just as a fool may hold
a penny-piece to his eye, and say he has hidden the sun. On the subject
of Christianity, there is a very common mistake which I would guard you
against. Christian faith is not a mere assent to an orthodox creed; not a
mere acceptance of a speculative system of opinion. Christian faith is a
thing of will, of ingenuousness, of candor, and of loyalty. The unbelief
that will be visited with judgment at the last day is, the wilful,
stubborn, uncandid, prevaricacious, unpersuadable unbelief. Easiness of
temper does not make a just man; no more does easiness of credence make a
believing man.

Conceiving then that you are honestly anxious to arrive at truth, I will
endeavor in this address to meet some of the difficulties which once
perplexed my own mind. _The being of God_, or the mystery attaching to
the Divine existence, not unnaturally disturbs the mind upon the very
threshold of religious inquiry. Assuredly a God eternal, all-knowing, and
everywhere present is a mystery; but to stand in the midst of a universe
with endless marks of a designing hand, and to say there is no God, would
be a greater and more appalling mystery. Lord Bacon says: “I had rather
believe all the fables of the Talmud and Koran than that this universal
frame is without a mind.” May you not exaggerate this difficulty? Have
you not the image of God in nature? Look at the light of the sun. It
sends its rays through every cottage, every stream, and over every
living thing, and yet it never contracts a stain, and takes no soil.
It awakens the germs of life in organic nature, and they emerge in an
endless variety of forms; it clothes the forests with a robe of verdure,
paints the fields with countless flowers, and calls forth the song of
thousands of birds. It unchains from their icy bands the mountain-snows,
and sends myriad rills to make music through the valleys. It makes the
gladness of childhood, and cheers the gloom of age. At the same time, it
can photograph every mental emotion and every change of moral feeling.
No subtlety can deceive it; it pierces beyond the false look; it images
the character with startling justice. It is no labor to the sun to do
this. Endow this sun with mind; conceive that its rays not only pervade
and photograph every object, but do so consciously. Have you not here an
emblem of Him who takes this image of light?

Let me, my friend, guard you against the young man who whispers in your
ear that he does not believe in God. You will mostly find one of two
things—either that the creed of the atheist has been adopted by him
without two hours’ reflection on the matter, or is an after-thought to
make him comfortable in sin. How unreasonable would a man appear to
you who should have come home from the Paris exhibition of industry,
affirming that the edifice itself, its pictures, fountains, and manifold
products were the falling together of chance, or self-developed. But he
would be wise in comparison with the man who should see the myriad proofs
of design in the atmosphere, the soils, the foliage, and his own frame,
and affirm that there was no Almighty Designer. Out of ten thousand
proofs equally remarkable, let me mention one or two. Think of the egg
of a bird, so made that wherever it is placed the chick shall float
uppermost, so as to be near the warm bosom of its mother. Think of the
adaptation of the camel to its life in the desert. Its feet, not like the
hoofs of a horse, but cushioned with elastic pads, that do not sink into
the sand, but spread over it; its stomach set round with water-sacs, from
the supplies of which it can journey for days without coming to fresh
water; its eyes overhung with eyebrows, and nostrils that can be firmly
closed, whereby it is not incommoded with either the hot sand-clouds or
the glare of the desert. Think of a gulf-stream, sixty miles broad and
three thousand feet deep, which comes from the tropics every winter,
which secures an equable temperature for the fishes, and prevents the
seas at Stockholm and Norway from becoming a block of ice. While this is
so, there is a polar current which rises in Greenland, and hastens to
cool the tropics. These are single evidences of design out of millions.
And these myriad evidences in the heavens and earth, in every bird and
insect, every flowering shrub and blade of grass justify the assertion
that a man is a “fool” who says there is no God. I indeed admit to you
that, to men oppressed with sin and darkness, it is difficult to know and
trust God as the Creator. His immeasurable vastness seems to place him
far from us; but I shall soon show to you that God is made known to his
creatures through Christ. He who has not thought it unworthy to unfold
to man in the heavens the magnificence of his works, has not thought it
unworthy of himself to win back his creatures’ obedience and love by
sending his Son as a man. Christ has interpreted God to us. We understand
God in him. We know how to seek him, to find him, to trust him, to love
him.

After the existence of God, that of _an immortal spirit_, possessed by
every human being, lies at the basis of all religion. The argument would
be too metaphysical to prove here the immortality of the soul. I can only
suggest to you one or two considerations. There has been a universal
consent among the wisest philosophers of all times and nations, that the
soul remains after the body. “The consent of all,” said Cicero on this
subject, “is the voice of nature.” Observe also, that it is by the soul
we know of the existence of a universe. All sensation is the recognition
of effects on our senses, but that recognition is through consciousness
or mind. Note also, that the body changes, but the spirit remains. A man
may lose his hands or eyes, and the loss may have no effect whatever on
the soul. Consider again, that matter never perishes. If there is one
axiom in philosophy that is certain, it is this, that while particles
of matter may pass into new combinations, they never cease to have
existence. You may well, then, ask with Dr. Young:

                          “Can it be,
    Matter immortal, and shall spirit die?
    Above the nobler shall less noble rise?
    Shall man alone, for whom all else revives,
    No resurrection know? Shall man alone,
    Imperial man, be sown on barren ground,
    Less privileged than grain on which he feeds?”

Observe once more on this subject, there are manifold proofs that the
soul has in this state only the dawn of its being. The animals reach
perfection in a few years but men, at death, are only beginning to use
their faculties. The principle of thought, reason, and hope within them
has here only glimpses, outreachings, and aspirations of a higher life.
Are not these yearnings, this sense of incompleteness, prophecies of a
future life? Our lives here are not the tones of perfect harmony, but
rather like stringed instruments being attuned for celestial melody. And,
alas, what inequalities, what sufferings, what wrongs have some to endure
here that _require_ another state for vindication and rectification also!
If, therefore, you find one argument against the immortality of the soul,
you will readily find a hundred for it.

A further source of doubt is, _a false impression respecting holy
scripture_. You may have thought that the Bible, being called a
revelation from God, would be like a book written in heaven, and
altogether different from human works. But, in infinite wisdom and
mercy, this has not been God’s mode of revelation. He has condescended
to reveal his mind through the history, the follies, the virtues, the
sins, and struggles of men. This history is both human and superhuman.
It is human, for the men who wrote it carried into it the peculiarities
of their age and their culture. It is superhuman, for it truly and
faithfully tells the dealings of God with the first races of men, and
afterwards through Christ.

In the Old Testament history you have records of men who lived in an
earlier and ruder period of humanity; but the writing or the compilation
of these records has been controlled so as to teach the awfulness of sin,
the safety of righteousness, and the faithfulness of Jehovah. Dreadful
is it to be told of the incest of Lot; but it is merciful that we have a
justification of the warnings against the licentious nations of Moab and
Ammon, whose origin is thus narrated. It is painful to follow the history
of Saul, but it is merciful that we have such a vivid picture of the
miserable fruits of a self-love that poisoned otherwise noble impulses.
Through all the records of men in the Old Testament, you are taught, as
in the life of Jacob, that every wrong act has a seed of evil in it,
whose bitter fruits the doer has to eat, and that God’s providence is
perpetually controlling the good and the evil for the education of men
and of nations.

Look at the book of Psalms, the liturgy of prayers and praises for all
ages, the sacred ballads for humanity. There is much that is human in
these Psalms; but if God had sent down to us songs composed by the
angels, they would have been valueless by the side of those in this
incomparable book. While I am in this world of fierce temptation, of
suffering, and of moral weakness, what I want is, not so much angelic
musings and raptures, as the prayers of a man tempted, struggling,
suffering, fallen as I am; and yet a man ever reaching with such sobs
of penitence and intense heart-cries after God. I mourn David’s sin and
sufferings, but I feel grateful that the Scriptures have preserved to
me his Psalms, which interpret the fiercest beatings of my heart, the
lowliest confessions of my moral besetments, and the deepest aspirations
of my nature.

Look again at the epistles of the New Testament: you have here the
records of churches which fell, some into one error, others into
another. But these errors are such as are common to humanity. Admirable,
therefore, is the wisdom whereby inspired doctrines and consolations are
conveyed, not in any abstract method, but in their relation to the very
tendencies of our nature. Your objection, therefore, to the Bible, that
it is so human, is from an utterly mistaken impression of the mode in
which revelation could be best made to men, and from forgetfulness of its
deep, profound, and most precious adaptation to human life.

And here I cannot help adverting to the moral unfairness of infidelity.
In a recent conference of working-men, one of them told the meeting
that the history of the fall of man, in the second chapter of Genesis,
was so improbable that he rejected all which came after. Perhaps the
narrative is improbable to a mind intensely literal, unused to eastern
modes of thought, and which cannot find the truth under those partially
allegorical representations which most effectually teach the vast bulk of
the human race. The same objections are urged against the sun standing
still in the book of Joshua, and to the history of Jonah. I am not going
to reply to these objections. Infidels do not want a reply. If they did,
they would find scores. But what shall be said of the candor of a man
who, because of such objections, rejects the Old Testament, which abounds
in passages of the tenderest sympathy for the poor and for the suffering,
which demands the most exact rectitude between man and man, and which
taught a morality in those early days to which there is nothing at all
approaching in the annals of Egypt, Greece, and Rome? Let me recommend
you to turn to Leviticus 19:9, 10; Deuteronomy 24:13, 19-22.

See how the slavery of the nations was mitigated among the Hebrews
by the enforcement of the principle—which the Grecian and Roman law
denied—that it was the duty of the master to treat his servants as men,
to instruct them in his own religion, and to count them members of his
household. Shame on men who have in the Bible such consideration for the
toilers and such rebukes of oppressors, but who ignore all this, and
hold up the Old Testament to scorn because of one or two difficulties
to _their_ understanding.[3] Nothing so loudly proclaims that such
infidelity is not a thing of “honest” doubt, but of a bad mind and of a
bad heart. Difficulties there are in the Bible. I have studied most of
those difficulties, and confess with gratitude that they have one by one
disappeared. This I doubt not will be the case with them all. But to me
it seems that I should deserve the contempt of man and the indignation
of my Maker, if because of these difficulties, in times so remote and
in usages so different from modern customs, I set aside the book which
tells me of God’s profound interest in my race, which reveals my relation
to a spiritual world, which has purified the lives and pacified the
consciences of millions, and which has made just and considerate their
treatment of others.

_Miracles_ which bear witness to divine revelations are made an occasion
for doubt by some. Let us examine this objection candidly. Why are
miracles not believed? “_They contradict experience._” A few years ago
M. Boutigny, at a meeting of the British Association, caused ice to be
produced from a red-hot crucible. Surely this contradicted experience.
“_They are incredible to reason._” So is the fact that the sea once
covered the beds of sea-shells on the tops of the highest mountains.
“_The enemies of Jesus attributed miracles to magic._” The very proof
they were wrought; else they would have denied the facts, and not
resorted to this pretence. “_They are impossible, for they suspend
inflexible laws of nature._” To this modern objection I reply, there are
no laws of the universe except the direct agency of God. If, then, he
interposes to arrest a subject-law, there is no suspension of the law
of nature; the supreme law is still in operation. For example: By the
inflexible law of gravitation, a ball dropped from the top of a tower
falls to the earth. But suppose a man catches it in his hand, is the law
of gravitation suspended? Not at all. A controlling law is brought into
operation, to which, that law is obedient. Thus you have the agency of
God in miracles. Do not, I implore you, be swayed by writers who find it
the easiest of all things to multiply objections when they are utterly
indifferent about finding replies. Remember that in the first ages
miracles must have been worked, else Christianity, with the tremendous
sacrifices it demanded, could not have gained a footing in the earth,
much less have changed the religion of the Roman empire. Gibbon tried his
strength to dispute this, but never did a man so signally fail.

An exaggerated estimate of the _strength of literary skepticism_ has been
another source of doubt in these days. There are three writers especially
to whom this remark applies. The first is Dr. Colenso. He was believed
to be a learned theological scholar. Never was an estimate more false;
never did a more pedantic theologian take pen in hand. What pretensions
had such a man to be a guide, who more recently tried to prove that
there were no accredited prayers to Christ in the Bible, nor in the
Prayer-book, nor in the Presbyterian Psalter? Thirty-four instances
of direct prayer to Christ were at once pointed out in the Psalter;
more than twelve prayers to the Saviour were quoted as sanctioned by
apostolic practice in the New Testament, and passages of prayer to the
“Lamb of God” were appealed to in the Liturgy. If young men are to doubt,
let not a literary blunderer like this have weight with them. At the time
that the bishop of Natal’s work came out, a gentleman was commiserated on
the alleged overthrow of the Bible. “The Scriptures will be extinguished
now,” said the man of the world. The shrewd Yorkshireman replied: “Well,
you see I have lived long enough to hear many prophecies of this nature;
but the extinguisher has always been a wooden one, which the light has
burnt through.” My friend’s figure has remarkably come true. Dr. Colenso
had a reputation as an arithmetician; but this has well nigh gone, and
his theological books are marked sixpence on back book-stalls.

In like manner have the two other critics failed to get into the world’s
thought. Some years ago, Dr. Strauss sent forth a so-called “Life of
Jesus.” The greater part of the gospel narratives were resolved into
myths. More recently another edition came out, and facts which in the
first edition were called fabulous were now given as veritable history.
Is the “critical faculty” of such a man a safe guide to young men?

Later still, M. Renan, acknowledging that it was impossible to doubt the
substantial genuineness of the gospels and the Acts of the Apostles,
presumed to patronize Christ and Christianity. And what was his
conclusion? Do not start when I tell you: The Frenchman professes to
believe that thousands of the most bigoted Jews, and of enlightened
Greeks and Romans, renounced the venerable institutions of their fathers
and embraced a religion which demanded the severest sufferings and
sacrifices, because a woman under a love-spell of hallucination had
_fancied_ she had seen a young Galilean rabbi alive who was really dead!
Just conceive what would now be the effect on Europe of a new religion
whose fundamental fact had such puerile support. Why was it different on
educated Romans? Do not say I am deceiving you when I tell you that M.
Renan professes to believe that the apostle Paul abandoned prejudice,
station, privilege, prospects, and braved scorn, appalling sufferings,
and a martyr’s death, because he had been frightened in a thunder-storm!
Talk about credulity, was there ever credulity like this? Alas, what
monstrous absurdities will men believe rather than the plain testimony of
Scripture! Woe to the dupes of a literary skepticism which changes its
creed every five years!

It may be in addressing you, my friend, on the spirit of doubt which
taints and enfeebles this age, that you have been influenced by what
is deemed _the attitude of scientific men_ towards Christianity. A
flagrant and most mischievous impression is abroad that scientific men
in our times are infidels. Very confidently do I affirm that it is not
so. I have attended meetings of learned societies in London, and of the
British Association in the country, and have heard these meetings spoken
of as atheistic, when out of hundreds of scientific men there were not
a dozen whose language could have justified such an imputation. Such
distinguished leaders of science as Professor Owen, Professor Phillips
of Oxford, and Sir Roderick Murchison, would indignantly repudiate the
charge of seeking to undermine the faith of England in Christianity;
and in this they would have the sympathy of an overwhelming majority of
scientific men in the British Isles. Your danger is not so much in the
facts science has established, as in the false notions which have been
caught up of these facts. A scientific discussion would be beside the
object of this address; but note these accordances between one science
and the Bible: Scripture affirms the late date of man upon the earth; so
does geology—Sir C. Lyell says, “No discovery has shaken our belief in
the extremely modern date of the human era.” Scripture teaches that the
world was once covered by water; so does geology: “It is concluded as a
fundamental maxim in geology,” says Professor Phillips, “that the whole
area now occupied by dry land was once covered by sea.” Scripture teaches
that God made the dry land to appear; and geology affirms that the
rocks, or dry land, have been upheaved from the waters. Scripture teaches
that the beasts were created after their kind; that is, each group made
up of a number of species; so does geology. The Bible, written for an
unscientific age, has thus these marvellous agreements with science in
its most recent developments. You perhaps hear of a solitary scientific
mind tracing back man to a sea-shell; but another says, “The idea that
a mollusk could become a fish, or a lizard a man, is worthy only of a
madman, and gives but poor evidence of the progress of civilization at
the present time.”[4] Indeed, there is no utterance that looks adverse
to Scripture which is not met by a decided divergence of opinion equally
scientific.

Turn from these questionings to the history of Jesus Christ as contained
in the four gospels. The most consummate learning of the enemies of the
faith cannot invalidate these gospels. Their genuineness has borne every
critical test of the most advanced scholarship. The evidence for their
absolute truthfulness is immeasurably greater than for the authenticity
of any secular book which the past has transmitted to us. You believe
that eight hundred years ago a conqueror landed in England who abolished
the Saxon monarchy. On testimony better than that for the belief in
William the Conqueror have you the fact confirmed to you, that eighteen
hundred years ago, in a strip of fair and sunny land in Asia—a land which
for two thousand years had been the theatre of events which marked it out
as the scene for some grand evolvement of historic import—there appeared
a Teacher from Galilee, just rising into the maturity of manhood. He
unites in Himself the most unusual varieties of character. He has vast
intellect and the tenderest sensibility; the calmest judgment and the
keenest feeling. He is lowly, but always magnanimous; He is meek, and yet
majestic; He is most compassionate to human frailty, but abhors human
vice; He is despised, but never fretted; insulted, but never ruffled;
never is He charged with sin, yet by a strange and precious sympathy He
draws to Himself the sinful and the outcast. He is essentially human;
is found at the marriage feast and the evening meal. He speaks parables
which childhood can understand, and over which genius wonderingly
lingers. His teaching is so profound, wise, and novel, that it for ever
shades all the teaching of the wise men of antiquity. He did works which
no other man had ever done. He invited all heavy-laden ones to come to
him for rest, and announced that He was “the Light of the world.” During
a brief ministry, over five hundred men and women so believed in Him,
that afterwards many of them laid down their lives for His sake. Very
soon after His death upon the cross, when he startled his enemies by the
loud cry, “It is finished,” a “_vast multitude_” in Rome itself enrolled
themselves as His disciples. This fact comes to us on the testimony of
the heathen historian Tacitus; and Gibbon admits it must be received as
unquestionably genuine.

This Jesus Christ we affirm to be the Son of man and the Son of God. He
is the Revealer of God. He pierced to the core of human misery, while
he wielded the resources of omnipotence; he wound about his heart human
sympathies, but now sits at the right hand of God exalted. My brother, I
solemnly tell you that to refuse to believe in Christ after the evidence
afforded will violate your candor, will trample on the rectitude of your
reasoning, and will bring on you consequences which you will eternally
deplore. I cannot utter words that deserve comparison with those of
Christ himself: “I am come a light into the world, that whosoever
believeth in me should not abide in darkness.” “He that rejecteth me hath
one that judgeth him: the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge
him in the last day.”

You may ask, Can a man be lost for _sincere_ doubt? If a man clings to
this doubt, if he will not candidly inquire, if he refuses to receive
testimony, he will be lost; not because of his doubt, but because of his
obstinacy. This talk of sincere doubting is often very unreasonable talk.
A man may sincerely doubt whether it is well to sow corn in the autumn
or spring, and he may sow his fields in July; but his sincerity will not
save him from bankruptcy or the workhouse. A schoolboy may sincerely
doubt the necessity of learning Euclid, history, and geography—he may
refuse the testimony of wiser heads; but his sincerity will not save him
from going into mercantile or professional life a dunce, and the chances
are that he will rue his so-called sincere doubt to the end of his days.
You, my brother, will soon pass into a world shrouded with impenetrable
darkness. There is but one voice which can tell you of a way whereby
your spirit hereafter may reach a region of light and felicity. Should
you close your ear to that voice, and nurse your doubts, and refuse to
investigate, then let me tell you that there can be nothing for you at
the last day but “shame and everlasting contempt.”

Observe also, if you want demonstration that will overbalance all
difficulties, you will never find it. In the affairs of this life men act
on the _preponderance_ of evidence. If there should appear twenty reasons
for a course of action and only five against it, he would be reckoned a
fool who became swayed by the five, and refused to inquire further. In
mercantile life, the men who will never decide and act till they have
reasons which exclude all doubt, are left behind in the progress of
society, and become the poor and despised. Your condition in this world
is a test whether you will be true and docile. If you want light, there
is abundance to guide you; if you choose darkness, God will not compel
your belief.

I remind you, again, that no man has ever grown wise or good, or left a
permanent impression on his age, as a doubter. The heroes of all times
have been men of faith. Read the Book itself. The Bible is a locked
treasure to prejudice, but it never fails to satisfy candor. As you
stand outside one of our ancient cathedrals, and look up at its chancel
window, all looks cold, unmeaning, and uninteresting. But, as has been
well said, when on a sunny morning you have entered that chancel, “how
changed is that window! It is now gorgeous in beauty, and glows with
life. Cold and dreary outside, it is warm and radiant within. Instead of
being incomprehensible and obscure, it is full of meaning and glorious
harmony?” Such is the difference between reading the Bible as a doubter
or as a critic, and going to it as one interested in its contents and
willing to be taught.

Follow for a moment the course of two young men. Your acquaintance
will supply the sketch readily. See one coming in the morning from the
chamber where he has looked with affection and trust into the face of
his Saviour; has supplicated strength to meet the day’s duties and
temptations; and has pondered the words, “Wherewithal shall a young man
cleanse his way? by taking heed thereto according to thy word.” He enters
the family circle to meet the mother’s smile, a brother’s greeting, and a
sister’s cheery welcome. His father, with proud joy, consults him as an
equal. He is a firm link in the family chain of happiness. See him as he
stands on the floor of the warehouse with uprightness. The tricky trader,
when he cannot cheat him, respects his honor. He chooses friendships
that are elevating. No profane scorner walks by his side; no impure
profligate soils the atmosphere of his home. He spends his evenings amid
cheerful enjoyments, ennobling elevations, or useful ameliorations.

Contrast the other. He rises from a prayerless bed; drags down stairs his
wearied frame at the latest possible moment; the older members of the
family have gone off to their several duties. As for him, the debauch of
the last night makes every thing wrong: the coffee is thick; the servant
slow; the very cat’s quietness upon the hearth irritates him, and with a
kick he relieves his pent-up discontent. To his mother he is rude; the
younger children have scampered away at his approach, saying their “big
brother is so sulky.” The clock sounds; he is off to business. The whole
day he is confused and hindered by the remembrance of the last night’s
pollution, or the planning for the coming evening’s pleasure. When the
evening has come, he goes where he will degrade young women in a way
which would arouse his direst indignation should another do the same to
his sister; or he enters scenes where he would die with shame if his
mother or sister could follow him. And this is the young man whose law is
a miserable and hateful selfishness, or who on a Sunday afternoon reads
an infidel book for five minutes, and then says, “Ah, I knew the Bible
was false, and Christians all hypocrites.” Poor pitiable wretch! as if
the judgment of such a man was of the slightest value against Scripture.

And observe, the end will come. A nurse very recently was summoned to a
sick-bed in Paris. The invalid was a young Englishman. Before she would
enter upon her duties, she asked if the sufferer was a Christian. Upon
being answered in the affirmative, she said: “I have seen such horrible
sights, and heard such wailings in the dying chambers of ungodly and
dissolute men, that I dare not now undertake to nurse another such a
one.” Tronchan, in his memoirs of Voltaire, says: “I wish that those who
had been perverted by his writings had been present at his death. It was
a sight too horrid to witness.” These are awful facts and foreshadowings
after a life of infidel pleasure.

Let me add a test of your sincerity. One of the most accomplished and
gifted of authoresses has told us that dark doubts on divine subjects
once shrouded her spirit. As she looked up at midnight to the vault of
the heavens, and saw the stars moving in serenity and order, the thought
came over her troubled spirit, “The Creator of those orbs must take an
interest in me, his rational creature. I hold to nothing but a dim hope
of his existence. I will take my dark mind to him, and ask him for light.
Prayer shall be with me the ‘_test of truth_.’” To that sincere cry the
answer came. Her heart, intellect, and conscience, found rest in Christ;
the Bible became to her an exhaustless fount of wisdom; in mathematical
culture and in musical taste she became distinguished, and her life
became signally useful. Two eminent men were lifted out of their doubts
by the promise in Luke 11:13. “If the Bible be true,” they reasoned,
“the Lord will give his Spirit to them that ask him. We will put this
promise to the proof.” The one—John Newton—became the most influential
preacher of the gospel in the British metropolis; the other—William
Wilberforce—became one of the best, most useful, and most honored of
statesmen.

My brother, let this be the test of your sincerity. Will you earnestly
and perseveringly ask God to fulfil this promise in you?

I shall close this address with twelve articles, which may be termed THE
CREED OF THE INFIDEL.

1. That Book is to him an imposture and pretended revelation, which
furnishes the only explanation ever offered of human misery, suffering,
and death; which responds to man’s universal craving for immortality,
and throws the clearest light upon a future state; which presents the
sublimest views of the compassion of the Creator; which paints a picture
of man which has had an exact transcript in the history of all nations,
and on behalf of which myriads rise up to testify that it has been a
ceaseless impulse to aspirations, a comfort in their trials, and has
taken away the fear of death.

2. He believes that the earlier narratives of the Bible were fabrications
intended to glorify the Jewish nation: but somehow these fabrications are
totally unlike the legendary traditions of Greece and Rome; for instead
of making their ancestors gods and heroes, they make them slaves, and
tell a history of Jacob and his sons which covers their progenitors
with infamy; and strange to say, these fabrications imposed upon later
prophets, who were the sternest denouncers of falsehood, and are now
imposing upon six millions of Jews, who, with a tenacity unparalleled and
sacrifices ceaseless, cling to the ritual and history of their ancestors.

3. He believes that by some unaccountable species of literary deception,
unlettered or fanatical men have pretended to give four narratives of the
founder of Christianity, which the greatest modern critics confess are
“the very gold of simplicity, integrity, and truthfulness,” and which
present an image of Jesus Christ that brings most vividly into view the
very perfection of humanity, that has furnished a model for the noblest
spirits among men, and that surpasses in beauty and grandeur all that
poetry ever sung of human genius ever conceived.

4. He believes that the writers of the New Testament were either knaves
or fools; and yet they taught the purest, wisest, most elevated, and most
self-sacrificing system of morals the world has ever seen.

5. He believes that in the most enlightened and skeptical age of the
Roman Empire, thousands of men were such arrant fools as to give credence
to a history of Christ which was full of lies, and to a record of
miracles which had never been worked, and this at a time so near to the
events, that an imposture could not have escaped detection for an hour.

6. He believes that “a vast multitude” of Romans, Greeks, and Jews
deserted, for a fanatical superstition, the splendid temples of their
fathers, the schools of philosophy of which they had been proud, and the
religion of their ancestors, which had been enriched by the grandest
historical associations.

7. He believes that the early propagators of Christianity, and the
believers in it, acted altogether contrary to ordinary motives of
weak or bad men; they embraced a creed which, instead of gaining them
aught, exposed them to the most diabolical cruelties, and held to their
testimony in the face of tortures, banishment, and a shameful death.

8. He believes that, although Christianity is a lying system of priestism
or fanaticism, it nevertheless, according to irrefutable testimony,
abolished the ferocious deeds of the amphitheatre, overthrew the horrid
rites of paganism, introduced an era of benevolence, and marked a new
starting-point of progress for the human race.

9. He believes that twelve obscure, penniless Jews, with a higher wisdom
than was claimed by Socrates, Cicero, or Plato, taught the only religion
which has been proved to be adapted to every country and every condition
of man on the surface of the wide globe.

10. He believes that the Christian Sabbath, or the weekly seventh-day
rest, is an institution indispensable to the present physical condition
of men and animals; that without it modern civilization would bring to
myriads of men and beasts unbroken toil, disease, and premature death;
but that this seventh-day rest is a purely human institution, having
come, he scarcely knows how, from men who were foisting on the world
false and illiterate traditions under the name of divine revelations.

11. He believes that the writings of the Christian Scriptures, although
an ill-constructed collection of falsehoods, have never been proved
false by the subtlest ingenuity of their enemies, but have been most
firmly held to be true by men of the profoundest intellect, of the most
resolved and persevering investigation—the very scholars, thinkers, and
master-spirits of humanity, such as Newton, Bacon, Milton, Boyle, Locke,
Pascal, Davy, Chalmers, and a host besides.

12. He believes that those great nations of Europe which are immensely
in advance of all the nations of antiquity, and of all the heathen and
Mohammedan nations of Asia at this time, and which are distinguished
for their liberty, wealth, culture, arts, schools, asylums, charity, and
beneficence, have become so while under the sway of a miserable system of
religious superstition, which a few unlettered fanatics palmed upon the
world eighteen centuries ago.

Skeptic, is this thy creed? Then, O man, great is thy credulity!

Trifler, who callest the Bible “weak folly,” take heed! thy despising of
Christianity may be shown to be thy folly and culpable weakness, which
will have to be deplored by thee for ever.

My doubting brother, you may turn the tables when reproached with the
beliefs of Christians, and point to the absurdities involved in THE
CREDULITY OF INFIDELITY.




POWER OF CHARACTER: HOW YOU MAY ASSERT IT.


Although it is perfectly true that we may so exalt our importance as
individuals as to feed self-conceit; although as a rule men think they
have more talents than they really possess, it is nevertheless certain
that there is not one man in ten who makes the most of himself for the
purpose for which he was created. The great waste of life is wasted or
perverted power. What noble youths come out of schools and colleges;
how few afterwards make their lives noble. With what opportunities do
many enter upon business and professions, and afterwards sink into the
grave with scarcely a trace to indicate that they ever lived. There have
been hundreds who could have rivalled the patriotism of Hampden, or
the humanity of Howard, or the eloquence of Chatham, and who have left
behind them no one memorial of their existence. It is recorded that a
fellow-student once said to Paley: “You are a great fool to waste your
best years in the dissipations of a university; you have talents for
something better.” To multitudes of gifted young men has the like thing
been said, but said in vain. Paley took the hint, which was roughly
given. And now “there is no name in the English church that stands higher
than his, and no name in the vast circles of English literature that has
a more permanent fame.”

The great things of this world have been accomplished by individuals.
Vast social reformations have originated in individual souls. Truths
that now sway the world were first proclaimed by individual lips. Great
thoughts, that now are the axioms of humanity, proceeded from the centre
of individual hearts. No warlike host delivered the children of Israel
from the bondage of Egypt, but one man—Moses. No senate of statesmen
raised Israel to a pitch of greatness that proclaimed a theocratic
nation to the world, but one man—David. No school of divines gave to
England the Bible in the mother tongue, but one man—Wyckliffe. No learned
society discovered America, but one man—Columbus. No association of
science revealed the clue to interpret the laws of the universe, but one
man—Galileo. No parliament saved English liberties, but one man—Pym. No
assembly of theologians wrote the book, which nest to the Bible has had
the most potent influence on the English language and on English hearts,
but one man—John Bunyan. No confederate nations rescued Scotland from
her distracted councils, from her political and ecclesiastical enemies,
but one man—Knox. No chambers of commerce taught Europe to abolish the
restrictions of trade, but one man—Richard Cobden. Doubtless these men
found their coadjutors; but all through the ages God has put immense
honor upon individuals.

Young man, do not let others fashion what your life shall be. Thomas
Carlyle says somewhere that he would like to stop the stream of people
in the Strand, and ask every man his history. But, “No,” says the sage,
“I will not stop them. If I did, I should find they were like a flock of
sheep following in the track of one another.” Alas, men begin to lose
their individuality of conviction the moment they step into the world.
Here is a young man beginning life’s business. He feels, as he starts, an
impulse to be pure and noble. He is surrounded by clerks in an office. A
fortnight passes, and one evening, when he is hurrying home after office
hours, he hears a fast young man whisper at the desk, “Poor fellow,
he’s off to be pinned to his mother’s knee.” Now, what would be the
right thing for that youth to do? To say at once, “Yes, and God forbid I
should ever forget what I owe to my mother.” Let him say this, and the
insulter would be shamed, if shame were not dead. He would respect the
self-assertion of his fellow-clerk. Does the new-comer say this? No; his
ears turn red; his face is suffused with a blush; and in a night or two
the poor weak one dares some trick of folly to show his independence, and
to prove that home influences do not bind him. Thus, alas!—how shall I
say it sorrowfully enough?—thus he makes a sacrifice of his individuality
on the altar that a profligate clerk has built up for him; and then, step
by step, he weaves around himself the bonds of pleasure, till, amid the
dark storm of shipwrecked character, blasted reputation, wrung hearts at
home, worn-out health, and miserable self-reproaches, he sinks to his
unhonored grave, leaving only a memory of disgrace to those who have
loved him.

I have known many a young man who has seen the right path as plain as
noonday. God has mercifully flashed clear conviction of duty upon him.
No mental mistake has hindered him. His judgment has been convinced; his
feelings have been moved; he has felt sure that it would be better for
him, for this life and for the nest, to take a decided position on the
side of God and righteousness. And what has hindered him? What has led to
waste and self-remorse? Has he been persuaded by the wise? Has he been
reasoned out of his convictions by the influential? No; he has been moved
by the jeer of a dandy or the sneer of the coquette; he has quenched his
conviction before the mocking taunt of some empty-brained street lounger;
has lowered his own high tone of morals lest he should seem _singular_ in
the little circle of worldly society surrounding him. Do you say, “Can a
man set himself against society?” If society quenches the true in you, if
it binds you, if it robs you of moral manhood, if it makes you its slave,
there can remain no question to you as to what is your duty. Scorn to
degrade yourself by yielding up your individuality to suit the whim of,
it may be, the worthless and vulgar.

You are stepping into life, where you will find thousands who became
vicious because they never formed the resolve to live nobly. Such men
are the dead leaves that fall upon the stream and flow, not by any vital
power or aim in themselves, but by the eddying current around them. There
is many a sot who is imbruted, because he never determined that he would
not be a drunkard. There is many a useless one who has become a cipher,
because he never resolved to give to his life a meaning. There is many
a filthy blasphemer who is profane, because he never resolved that the
foul oath should not soil his lips. There is many a defiled, polluted,
and diseased one, because he never resolved that he would not be the
companion of a whore. This is the sorrowfulest of all things—men ruined,
sinking into sin, vulgarity, uselessness, vileness, not because they
intended to be bad, but because they had not the courage to resolve to be
good.

It is yet more deeply to be lamented that the young men who are thus
ruined are mostly the open, the generous, and the frank. A cold nature
that no one cares for, that is not wanted in the drinking-room, or
smoking-room, or billiard-room, passes into manhood without hurt; but
good-natured and gleeful young men have a weak side whereby they become a
prey to the dissipated. They are companionable and sympathetic, therefore
miscreants suck them by temptation.

It would be grateful to our feelings if this compromise of individual
character were confined to the men who disregard the claims of virtue. It
is by no means so. A philosophic statesman, J. Stuart Mill, in his Essay
on Liberty, complains that no period of England’s history has been so
little marked by individual originality and force as our own. Certainly,
whether we look upon the merely moral or the professedly religious
circles of our country, we find everywhere the tendency to sink the man
in the crowd, the Christian in the church. This shifting of personal
responsibility from the one to the many is the secret alike of national
and of individual ineffectiveness. Only look around you, and you will see
hundreds who might assert for themselves, and for the cause of truth and
philanthropy, a position of dignity and power, who are hindered by the
maxims and habits of others.

There is a prevailing impression that it is women, with their quick
sensibilities, who are the most susceptible to the influences of fashion
and opinion. It admits of question whether this prevailing weakness in
our days is not on the side of young men. They do not so much make
manifest their subserviency, but it is not the less deteriorating and
real. Take a few examples.

Here, in a select neighborhood, is a young man who affects style. A place
in the omnibus would fit his limited means. But no; the omnibus is all
very well for men whose position is made, and for young fellows who have
no standing in society; but for him, a horse and groom must form a part
of his appointments. So he burdens himself, or speculates, or runs into
debt, that horse or “trap” may be at command. And thus he, who by manly
independence, and an expenditure according with his circumstances, could
have risen to be honored and esteemed, shrinks away at length into some
lower neighborhood, or drags out a vexed and discontented life, because
he has forgotten the honor which he might have commanded at the outset,
had he lived out his honest conviction and not made himself a mere
imitator.

Or take other cases. Yon beardless youth must smoke the, to him,
nauseous cigar or meerschaum, because “Tom Grandeur” struts down
High-street, looking large behind his curling smoke. Nay, “My Lord
Meek,” who cares no more for a hunt or race than the most refined and
timid lady, enlarges his stables, buys a fine stud, makes up his book
for the St. Leger; or, with a sore heart, joins the “throw off,” caring
not a whit for the brush, but very much that he may not be outdone in
his equipage or establishment. All through society this abnegation of
individuality weaves its web. Nor is the effect circumscribed to the
frivolous and weak. Men think in cliques. It is intolerable to some to
be out of fashion with the political opinion of their set. Never was
contradiction so contemptible as that into which they are betrayed. It
would be ludicrous, were it not too serious an indication of the want
of principle. One month you hear men denouncing a political opinion and
its prominent advocates, with all the vituperative energy of which their
nature is capable. The next month, forsooth, they have adopted that
precise opinion, and eagerly rush to share some leaf of the laurel which
they hope will fall upon them through the tergiversation of their party.

You have, alas, the same thing among so-called religious men. Many a
young man has powers which would bless the church and the world, but
for his maudlin regard for what others may think of him. He is, it may
be, a young man whose father’s religiousness gave him universal sway
in his town or neighborhood. No workman but honored him; no cottager
but felt the sweetness of his sympathy. The son of this great and good
man is thrown among Ritualists. This is the religious fashion of the
hour, and therefore it fascinates him. He adopts it, not because he is
convinced of its truth, but because it suits what he deems his “æsthetic
taste.” Deplorably ignorant of the past struggles of English history,
he is gratified with the crowded churches in which he can witness
this pictorial religion of waving censers, purple-robed priests, and
picturesque altar arrangements. He falls into the cant of saying that
Protestantism is “unsymbolical.” The white-robed choristers and lighted
candles respond to what he terms the “holy symbols” of the faith. He
begins now to think the religion that made his home a very paradise,
his wise father a man of power, and his mother saintly, is a very
vulgar thing, and only inculcated by unlettered men and unauthorized
teachers. And thus the poor soul excuses himself from the demands of
personal exertion and personal fidelity to conscience; loses himself in
the easy externalisms or poetic dreamings which secure him the favor
of sentimental pastors, and the smiles of young ladies with pendant
crosses on their breasts. It is pitiable, but it is also sad, to think
what ineffectiveness of life comes to a young man who, instead of being
the dupe of weaklings, might have allied himself with the grandest of
Englishmen, and left behind him records of abiding influence.

There is no circle where a man can escape this peril of being unduly
swayed by others. Many well-principled young men, who are free from
the follies I have glanced at, lose their power to influence through a
deplorable lack of force. Instead of quickness, briskness, strength,
in the warehouse, they do their work in a dreamy, sentimental way.
Their religious coterie is composed of people who are slow, sedate,
and lack vigor. They are taught to think that religion consists in
unctuous prayers, sanctimonious looks, effusive utterances, instead of a
consistent filling up of duty, care for their employers’ interest, and
faithful discharge of daily tasks. Oh, do not forget it is the action,
it is the life in the very sphere which God has appointed, that is the
opportunity for the manifestation of religion. All mere emotion is like
the steam from the engine—of no value except as an indication of ability
to work.

There is another danger. You will find a class of religious men not
at all sentimental, but who will sneer at what they term religious
earnestness. A young man’s worst enemies are often cold, formal, routine
Christians—Christians who think that to stand well with the world, to get
into “good society,” to be always very respectable, and to have as little
cross-bearing as possible, is the golden mean of religious life. Young
men, in the name of all that is true and noble, set yourselves against
this style of religious profession. The worst weakness in the world is to
fear to do a right thing because others will criticise it.

There were many Christian men in Wittemberg who said to Martin Luther,
“You don’t mean that you are going to hang up these theses on the church
door.” “Yes,” said Luther; “they are true; they assail damning error; my
fatherland is bowing down to antichrist.” “Pause,” said the men who would
stand well with everybody. “Is not this zeal without knowledge? Think
how you will scandalize the University; how you will drive off men who
would follow you in a more discreet course.” “Avaunt!” said the reformer.
“The people are perishing in ignorance. The crowds of the common people
who come into the city to market will read these words. Yours is not
discretion, but cowardice.” He did the deed; and as the result of that
act, Europe received the Protestant Reformation, and the night of the
middle ages was ended.

On one occasion, Nehemiah was urged by his friends to desert the post
of duty, to conceal himself in the courts of the Temple, for fear of
would-be assassins. With heroic decision, he replied, “Should such a man
as I flee? And who is there that, being as I am, would go into the temple
to save his life? I will not go in.” Brave, perfumed words!

During the mighty struggle for West Indian emancipation, Sir Thomas
Fowell Buxton was about to divide the House of Commons; his friends
appealed to him not to divide. They came one by one, sat down by his
side, urged and implored him not to divide; ministers of the crown
besought him to give way. In the whole House there was only one who
hoped and prayed that he would be true to the cause of the slave, and
that one was his daughter in the gallery. He was true to the cause of
humanity; and that division, Lord Althorp declared, decided the question
of emancipation. The question was next introduced before the House as a
Cabinet measure.

There went from Manchester to the British parliament, about twenty-five
years ago, a comparatively young man. He went up to London from a
conference of ministers of religion who had assembled to secure cheap
bread for the people. That conference had been satirized; not a solitary
ecclesiastical dignitary had ventured to be present; the leading journal
had attempted to cover it with ridicule. That young senator ventured to
defend the conference before a crowded House of Commons. His reference
was hailed with contemptuous laughter; the greatest statesman of the
day rebuked him. Observe! that young man lived to receive an apology
from that statesman, to hear him introduce the measure which had been so
unpopular, and to receive himself the designation which his name will
bear through all coming times, “The Apostle of Free-trade.”

I say, where you feel that you are right, be true to yourself; do not
take your cue from other men. They may be weak, or prejudiced, or
trimmers, or cowards. Why should you lose your individuality for them?

    “Oh, blessed is he to whom is given
      The instinct that can tell,
    That God is on the field when He
      Is most invisible.

    “And blessed is he who can divine
      Where real right doth lie,
    And dares to take the side that seems
      Wrong to man’s blinded eye.

    “Oh, learn to scorn the praise of men;
      Oh, learn to live with God;
    For Jesus won the world through shame,
      And beckons thee his road.

    “God’s glory is a wondrous thing,
      Most strange in all its ways;
    And of all things on earth, least like
      What men agree to praise.

    “For right is right, since God is God,
      And right the day must win;
    To doubt would be disloyalty,
      To falter would be sin.”

To make full assertion, therefore, of your personal character, let me ask
you to bear in mind these counsels:

1. _Do not tamper with convictions._ God in mercy sends you luminous
hours. He is the pitying Friend of your soul, and is constantly
persuading it to a higher life. I am quite sure that you cannot pass
into manhood without heavenly visitations. Do not, I implore, neglect
these visitations. Do not quiet your conscience by a subterfuge. Do not
hold the performance of a clear duty in suspense.

Behold a scene of which history tells us. There are two men standing face
to face in a Roman court in a maritime city. The one is a young king, his
beautiful queen by his side. There is all the pomp and circumstance of
station. Chief captains and principal men fill the royal court. Waiting
servitors surround the doors, and an eager multitude fill the avenues.
The other is an unattended, unbefriended prisoner, with a chain upon
his hand. That prisoner tells of a solemn moment when heaven flashed
conviction upon his path. He reasons with resistless logic and eloquence
in proof of the truth of Christianity. The young king listens—is moved;
it is not merely the prisoner that stands face to face with him, but
God himself; and his convicted conscience cries out, “Almost thou
persuadest me to be a Christian!” The assembly breaks up. The king is
alone in his chamber, and muses: “I become a Christian—the member of
a despised sect! There is clearly truth in what I have heard; but for
me to be a Christian, what will the world think of me? My interest and
pleasures forbid it.” The subject is dismissed, and we have not the
faintest intimation that another opportunity of salvation ever again
visited that man. He followed his race in the pursuit of ambition and
vice; he gradually lost influence and power; his days became troubled
and disastrous, and his name remains, like other Herods, unhonored and
disgraced. What of that other man—that unbefriended prisoner? He is the
foremost man in the world for all after times. One excepted, no name is
repeated among men so often as his. _His_ life is the life of Christendom
in these ages, and will be more and more. He has done more for truth,
righteousness, and human salvation, than any other sinful mortal in all
ages of the world. What was the secret of this majesty of influence? He
told it in that court. When heaven had flashed conviction upon his path,
he did not allow pleasure nor prejudice nor interest nor public opinion
to sway him. These are his words: “_I was not disobedient to the heavenly
vision._”

My friend, it has been to many a man a dreadful struggle to repent and
turn to God. There have been temptations formidable, and a vacillation
of the heart most perilous. But no man can be excused from the conflict.
A young man, who became one of the most devoted and constant Christians,
was accustomed to insist upon decision, decision, decision, to every
young man whom he addressed. Said he, “If you expect God to help you, you
must be perfectly _decided_.”

2. _Guard against the temptations of the times._ Far be it from me to
utter a word that would debar you from the recreations and excitements
appropriate to your age. Joy and cheerfulness are your strength and
heritage. Monkish austerity and sanctimoniousness are rarely virtues.
But our modern civilization has multiplied, under the name of pleasure,
the facilities of vice. The perils that assail young men in great cities
are so many, so seductive, and so ruinous to body and soul, as to make
an observer tremble. If, then, you would be obedient to the heavenly
teaching, you must resolutely resolve not to “go in the way of evil men.”
There was a time in England when places of business were homes. The
employer admitted young men to the domestic sanctities of his family.
They received aid from him in the formation of acquaintances, and had
even access to his own circles of recreation. Now, young men in cities
can scarcely be said to have a home. Some have not even the privilege of
a common room, or a fire in their chamber. They are open, therefore, to
every allurement that promises pleasure. Places of business, moreover,
are huge establishments where the loose moralist can cover vice by
self-deceivableness, and where the subtle infidel, the scoffer, and
the licentious mingle together. Religion is ridiculed, and the clergy
spoken of with a sneer. Filthy books are sold and circulated—books of
infamy, which minister to the vilest tastes, which taint and befoul the
imagination with unclean images, and which a man can no more look at
without defilement than he can touch soft pitch and be clean.

Alas, wherever a young man turns for worldly amusement he meets danger.
Large towns swarm with brilliantly lighted saloons, which hold out their
meretricious attractions. There is the drama, music, and art. It was
ascertained that in two hours one evening, six hundred young men entered
one music hall in London. Were these rooms harmless, he would be an
enemy to human happiness who objected to them. If they are demoralizing
and ruinous to the health and character of the inexperienced, he is
a friend who points this out. It is little suspected how women with
bedizened head-dresses and flaunty robes are holding the last shred of
their modesty; how married men hide under white waistcoats polluted
hearts; how, while “gray hairs dance, devils laugh and angels weep;” how
bankrupts wear forced smiles, and the wretched try their poor jokes;
how the victims of disease and death hide their ghastliness by flowers,
and light their rapid progress to the grave by flaring gas-light. It
is little known how thousands of young men from the religious homes of
Scotland and Wales pass into a speedy oblivion after their feet have once
crossed the threshold of these rooms in English cities. Alas, what a
tale might be told of fathers’ hairs whitened, mothers’ hearts crushed,
sisters’ eyes swollen with tears, over sons once the pride of their
homes. If you would be pure, then, you must avoid these places. They will
speedily prejudice you against religion. They will turn your doubts into
blank unbelief and atheism. They will quench in you even the desire for
immortality. They will turn into terror or scoffing every restraining
influence. And what help can there then be for you for this world or for
the next?

3. _Have faith in the significance of your life._ There is no
exaggeration when a living writer says: “If there were the smallest
star in heaven that had no place to fill, the oversight would beget a
disturbance which no Leverrier could compute. One grain of sand, that
did not fall into its place, would disturb, or even fatally disorder
the whole scheme of the heavenly motions. Every particle of air has
its appointed place, and serves its appointed end.” God, dear young
man, means something by you. Yours may not be the highest, but there
is some high work which you may fulfil. The low grass-tuft is not the
branching cedar towering for centuries on Lebanon; nor is it the fragrant
orange-blossom, which is plucked to deck the bridal wreath; but neither
the orange-blossom nor cedar could render the service of that lowly
grass-tuft. In sacred converse with your Maker, breathe the prayer,
in this the formative period of your existence: “Lord, what wilt thou
have me to do? Why have I an existence among these living souls of this
creation? Why hast thou given me these grand and awful endowments of
thought, reason, intelligence, speech? I look round on the universe,
and see all creatures fulfilling their appointed service. I see the sun
filling the whole hemisphere from day to day with his light and heat.
I see at night the stars lighting up the arch of the firmament, each
keeping his appointed place, the silent preacher of obedience to thy
will. I see the bird that balances its pinions on the air, testifying of
thy goodness. I learn that the tiny invisible insect is answering its
purpose in preserving the salubrity of the atmosphere and the purity of
the water. I find every fragrant violet of the hedgerow and every shock
of corn fulfilling a mission of serving. I learn from thy word of the
higher spirits that dwell in thy presence, that they have their appointed
work; that angels are ministering spirits, and do thy commandments,
hearkening to the voice of thy word; and as I thus behold a universe
where each has its appointed place, I utter the prayer more earnestly,
“What is the meaning of my life, Father of spirits? I share thy counsels;
reveal thy thought respecting me.” Deeply am I convinced, my brother,
that if with some such prayer you enter upon this period of your life,
your existence wall prove no meaningless thing; it will be instinct with
influence, and will have an end to which you will come with unutterable
rapture.

I have in the foregoing considerations helped to answer the question
how you may assert the power of your personal character. I by no means
say that you should disparage associations. The most useless men are
those who will never combine. Exaggerated individuality makes a man
impracticable, and sometimes insupportable. On the other hand, our modern
danger lies in another direction. It is so to shape ourselves by others
as to destroy force and effectiveness.

Gibbon tells us a tragic history, which has been more amply narrated by
Count Montalembert in his “Monks of the West.” The gladiatorial games
of Rome were continued until the beginning of the sixth century of our
era. They had turned a civilized people into savage cannibals. There,
in that enormous amphitheatre, whose tiers rising above tiers remain
to this day, tens of thousands of spectators looked down on the bloody
spectacle, and thousands of victims were slaughtered. A holy man in the
East heard of the deeds of blood. The fire of a righteous indignation
seized him. He travelled to Rome; arrived there as the imperial games
were being celebrated. His soul burned against the cruelty and the
impiety. He entered the Colosseum; burst through the waves of the people
all palpitating with ferocious curiosity. He threw himself between the
gladiators engaged in the sanguinary combat. In the name of the God of
heaven he commanded them to cease their murderous strife. The pagan
multitude were for a moment panic-stricken with the holy audacity of
the Christian. Then they cried out; they rose on him; they tore up the
arches; stones hissed around him; the gladiators completed the work of
death. But the blood of the martyr was the last shed in that arena. The
horrid custom, which had so long resisted the voice of humanity, ended
with that testimony. The nobleness of the sacrifice showed the horror of
the abuse. The emperor Honorius proscribed the games of the gladiators,
and they have never been revived.

Without any such sacrifice you may learn from it the might of a simple
act of decision for truth and conscience, and that by such noble deeds
your life may have immortal issues. Where the timid will start back in
fear, there you may bless the coming ages. The achievements of duty have
been grander than those of the warrior. Wordsworth says of duty:

    “Flowers laugh before her in their beds,
    And fragrance in her footsteps treads:
    She does preserve the stars from wrong,
    And the eternal heavens through her are fresh and strong.”

At the beginning of manhood you stand now; a few years, and you will
stand at the end. The span is brief; the earthly life is only one. These
lines are written for your sake alone. No interest can another have in
your living a noble life that is comparable to the interest you have
in yourself. If you find at the end of life that you have made a grand
mistake, it will be a mistake you never can undo. Soon the shadows
will flee, and men will be judged, not by the earthly standard, but by
what they have been and have done. Sometimes when bales of merchandise
leave England for a colonial port, the price put upon them there is
very different from that they had here. So when you have gone through
the gates of death, the angels will not ask how you stood with this
world; but they will estimate you by your fidelity, your sympathies, the
consecration of your life to chat which was true and good. Alone you
will go into that eternity, as alone you came into existence. Alone will
you tread the path to the throne of God; alone you will be judged; alone
will your opportunities come up in review; alone will you carry through
eternity the results of the one earthly life you have lived. Said a noble
youth, who lived long enough to fulfil high promise: “I shall die as an
individual; I shall be judged as an individual: I am resolved, therefore,
to live as an individual.” It is just this purpose to which, in God’s
name, I summon you in this address. Let it be so, my brother. Take thy
place with the illustrious ones of all times who have lived to bless the
world. Pass on to manhood and to immortality with the seal of God upon
thy brow. And then, when death has done its mission, disenthralled of
flesh, thou shalt rise to the unobstructed sphere where hinderance never
comes, and where thou shalt begin an illimitable work. There, with thy
life grafted upon the infinite, it will be fruitful as no earthly life
can be.




GRANDEUR OF DESTINY: HOW YOU MAY REACH IT.


The belief in the doctrine of growth is of infinite moment to a young
man. The difference between one man and another lies here. Find a
young man who does not believe in the doctrine of moral growth, or is
indifferent to it, and you may safely affirm that waste or perdition
is being invisibly inscribed upon his forehead. On the other hand, let
a young man be thoroughly persuaded of the possibility of the highest
moral and spiritual progress, and he not only has hold of a truth that is
saving, but if faithful, he will reach a majesty of character, a force,
and a beauty of spirit of which no mortal can conceive. Let me illustrate
the subject of this address. You look at a seed-corn when lodged in the
earth. Growth is its law. After the first discipline of wintry frosts,
it uplifts its stalk beneath the warm breath of the south; then unwraps
from its careful green foldings its delicate ear, and lifts it up for the
golden sun to ripen it. Arrived at perfection, it offers itself to man
for higher uses, and becomes part of his strength. Or, again, the acorn
having found its place in the favorable soil, puts out feelers, and sends
them into the earth for more moisture. Modestly it breaks through the
ground to take its place among its compeers of the forest; drinks in the
air, rains, and dew of heaven; extends its little branches, twigs, and
leaflets, that its receiving-power may be greater. Growth, unceasing, is
its law. Its beauty is the charm of the woods in May; its topmost leaves
quiver in the breeze of summer; its strong arms beat back the storms of
autumn; and for generations and centuries it grows in its magnificent
completeness.

And who shall limit the growth of a young man? How true of him, “it
doth not yet appear what we shall be.” Like the youth who climbed
mountain-heights with “the banner of strange device,” so he may ever see
“_not yet_” shining like a star on the brow of the future. The youth,
the trusting Christian, the devoted worker, the mature saint are but the
lowest steps of his ever-ascending destiny.

One of the grandest mornings of my life was, when I reached the pass
of St. Gothard across the Alps. Having ascended above the sultry airs
of an early Italian summer, and slept three thousand feet above the
sea-level, I rose at four in the morning, and begged the privilege of
sitting on the roof of the diligence by the side of the conductor. How
invigorating was the fresh mountain-air of the morning, like the first
love of a young heart to Christ. But as the road toiled upward, more
and more ravishing was the joy. The mountain-pines now began to open
vistas of wondrous beauty; the graceful tops of the larches waved in
their uninvaded home; the granite rocks, with a thousand precipitous
forms, stood like sentinels to nature’s most majestic domains; the Ticino
poured down to the sultry plains below its rushing sound of waters.
There behind was the river, gliding on like a silver thread of light;
and there before were glimpses of giant peaks, with the light burnishing
the peerless white of their eternal snows. But for nine rapturous hours
we went higher; and as we ascended, fresher grew the air, more beautiful
the leaping waterfalls, more sublime the pass through galleries of rocky
labyrinths, more thrilling the transition from gloomy defiles to spots of
pastoral loveliness, and more exciting the emotion as we stood at length
about nine thousand feet above the valley below, amid the sinless silence
of the everlasting hills.

In a loftier sense than this, higher and even higher may be a Christian
young man’s progress. Follow him. He is active and devoted in all that
blesses man; he rises in harmony of character and effectiveness of
influence; he comes to have a name in the community of men, and is a
man of mark among his fellows; to those coming on the stage of life he
becomes the pattern-man; and those who once sneered at his decision and
aspirations would now be glad to catch the skirts of his garments.
“Not yet,” he may say, “have I reached the stature of growth.” Fruits
of goodness ripen in his life; wider is the sphere he fills; he is yet
more loved, trusted, and honored; till at length he sees the gate and
the glory of the city he is going to; above the sounds of conflict he
breathes supernal air, and listens as there reach him from afar the
sounds of heavenly music. And when the golden gates have been thrown back
to give him entrance, and the angels have welcomed him, and the great
and good of other times have clasped hands with him, even then growth in
power and blissfulness shall be the law of his being. He will rise to
be a companion of the mighty spirits of the universe. Higher, stronger,
wiser, freer, mightier, more capable of knowing, blessing, enjoying will
be his glorious and eternal career.

I am dealing in no figures of speech. This is the grandeur of man’s
destiny. This is the true law of life; and none the less true that so
many miserably fall short of it.

And now, young man, I speak to you who are just starting on a career
that may be thus sublime; and to you I say there is a _divine secret_ of
this eternal growth. That secret is in one word—_receiving_. Look again
at nature. The flowers grow by receiving. Place them where they can
receive neither sunlight nor moisture, and they will droop and die. As
the sun arises by morning in the heavens, they turn to him their expanded
bosoms, that his warm beams may fall there. They spread out leaves to
take in more rain; they fold themselves in restful quiet at night, that
dew-drops may settle on their buds and stems. After this manner man
grows. Among the sentences of Scripture there are two which deserve to be
written on the walls of a young man’s chamber in letters of gold: “A man
can receive nothing except it be given him from heaven.” “Every good gift
and every perfect gift is from above.”

I do not mean to affirm that you are to be passive. Go again to nature
to learn her parable. The plant grows by receiving; but it is not, like
rocks and stones, dull and inert; it avails itself of its advantages for
growth. It coöperates in working out its perfection. It opens its ducts;
it builds upon itself new lengths of wood; it is faithful to its gifts,
and makes every new attainment a plea for larger blessings.

Dear young man, study _your_ nature. In the truly-developed man there
are three powers—body, soul, spirit. This three-fold distinction which
is made in the Bible, remarkable to say, is also that of the latest and
maturest philosophy. The _body_ grows up from childhood by receiving;
and even in mature strength it builds up a ceaseless waste by the same
process. The _soul_ or _intellect_ grows by receiving. It receives
information; allows itself to be cultured; avails itself of the stores
which other times have acquired. It never creates. What seems so is
only reaching the full meaning or placing in new combinations what it
has received. There is, however, a _spirit_ in man. To this I turn your
thoughts. Deep in your nature is the grandest of all your endowments.
There, unthought of, it may be, is that divine faculty which separates
you from the brutes and allies you to the seraphim. There, smouldering in
darkness or selfishness, is a spirit which nothing earthly can satisfy;
which sends forth aspirations after God; which hungers after the good;
which protests against that filth of animal indulgence under which it
is often buried; but which, on the other hand, can be moved, and grow,
and expand, and become the dominant principle, and bring all evil into
subjection to itself, and become elevated in wisdom and ascendency,
till, shaking off every encumbrance of corruption, its powers are free,
glorious, and triumphant.

Let me quote to you a sentence from one of the profound religious
thinkers of our age: “The religious talents compose the whole Godward
side of faculty in us. There is the talent of being illuminated,
permeated, guided, exalted by the Spirit of God. There is also the talent
or capacity of religious love. Man can appropriate the love of God, which
can pour itself in as a tide with mighty floods of joy and power. There
is also the power of faith, which can fall on God in recumbent trust,
and appropriate him in all his personality of goodness and love. These
talents are the highest, noblest, closest to divinity of all the powers
we have.”

Most of the visitors to the Exhibition of Industry of 1862 saw that
costliest of all diamonds, the Kohinoor. There was a time when that
priceless gem gave not out a ray of brilliancy. Deep in the darkness it
lay; no light shone on it; no light came back from it. But it was placed
in the light; its opaque substance was opened. Its power of receiving had
freedom. It now allowed the minutest ray unimpeded passage through its
mass. And then how marvellous the transformation. It shone and glittered
and shot back light like the most brilliant star.

By these analogies have I sought to reveal to you the nature of that
spiritual growth to which you are summoned. Hearken, I implore you, to
the cry of your own immortal spirit. Open your nature, that you may
receive the quickening life of the Almighty. You hear at this time much
about religious cant and hypocrisy. It seems as if even the better
class of novelists of our period could never expound their own moral
principles without a contemptuous sneer at the religious phraseology or
life of their fellow-Christians. But let me tell you, the cant which is
the most irrational, and the hypocrisy which is the most insane, is that
which deems it manly to live without communion with God. Ashamed to be
in communion with heaven! Ashamed to be inspired by your Creator! What
madness would be this—if the sapphire should be ashamed of the light that
makes its beauty; if the quivering beech-leaves should be ashamed of the
sunbeams that dance on their smooth surface; if the flowers should be
ashamed of the daybreak that reveals their hues; if fields, hills, and
the whole realm of nature should be ashamed of the precious influences
which the heavens pour down upon them. But for you, a child of God, to
be ashamed of receiving illumination and impulse, wisdom and elevation,
from the Father of your spirit, is the most pitiable misjudgment of which
any creature can be capable. Talk of religious cant—there is no cant
that is so hateful, because there is no cant that is so unreflecting
and senseless, as that which sneers at man having fellowship with his
Maker. It is God, my brother, who gives to every star its brightness,
to every cloud its nameless colors, to every lily its snowy whiteness,
to every tiny ocean-shell its mingled hues. Oh, then, go to him. Ask
him to condescend to bless you with his indwelling life, to give power
to the right thing in your nature, to irradiate you with his light, to
actuate you by his love, and to be an impulse of perfection within you.
As you open your nature to receive God, the spirit within you will spring
forward; it will respond swiftly to the touch of its original Source;
it will rise in protest against the weaknesses and passions that have
choked and smothered it. Blessed with the movements of God, it will glow,
develop, acquire ascendence; it will bring all your nature into harmony
and peace; it will be an impulse to all that is “lovely and of good
report.”

But observe this, my friend—if you will hearken to your carnal
inclination; if you will give heed to the drivelling folly of fools;
if you will not receive Christ; if you will have none of his counsels,
none of his institutions; if you will choose none of his ways—then in
you there never can grow up a spirit trained for perfect bliss. Men
object to hell. What is hell, but to be outside the loyalty and love
of heaven? It is an infinite right due to the universe to keep out of
heaven a spirit that has rejected the aid that would have made it fit
for heaven. It may be a mercy to keep a soul, all of whose tastes are
carnal and earthly, out of heaven, as it is a mercy to take a creeping
worm out of uncongenial sunlight, and place it in darkness. If you have
allowed idiots to teach you that it is manly to sneer at prayer to God,
what right have you to complain if you remain unblessed by God? If you
deliberately choose darkness instead of light, what wrong is done you
if you are left in the “outer darkness,” whatever that may be? If a
flowering plant should say, “I will not have what heaven’s influences can
do for me,” it would be righteously excluded, in its hideous deformity,
from the monarch’s banqueting-hall. Ah, that plant _must_ be obedient.
But you, akin to the angels, have the awful liberty of disobedience. If
you choose not Christ, it will be because you harden your heart against
him; because you close your nature to the heavenly drawings that would
bless you. There is a passage of Scripture of fathomless significance.
The gracious gifts of God to the spirit of man are said to be to eternal
life, but “sin” is said to “_reign unto death_.” Yes, the principle
of sin in the nature, if yielded to, if not overcome by God’s Spirit,
quenches the innocence of infancy and the purity of youth; corrupts the
imagination, defiles the affections, inflames the passions, hardens the
feelings, degrades soul and spirit to be slaves to the flesh, deadens
religious capacity, extinguishes holy susceptibility, darkens the
understanding to the things of God, makes gross the heart, dulls the
hearing, murders the angel in a man, and kills every heaven-directed
aspiration; and then—and then—what remains for such a spirit but to
abide in death, and be left to wander for ever in the unknown realms of
disloyalty and everlasting darkness?

On starting in life, then, I would charge and beseech you to rise to
the true elevation of your nature. Among men there are _five classes_.
The _lowest_ class are the slaves of fleshly appetites. These are the
sensual, the debauched, the lascivious, the drunken. The _second_ class
obey the world, and judge after the worldly standard. These are the
lovers of pleasure, lovers of style, lovers of money, lovers of power.
The _third_ class are the intellectual. Wisely they culture intellect,
but they neglect the heart. They acquire information, but not benevolent
emotions. They investigate nature, but do not see the glories of nature’s
God. Higher still, there is the _fourth_ class—the moral. They are the
soul of honor; they love liberty; they teach political principles; they
profess to comprehend the duties that man owes to his neighbor. The
summit, however, of greatness, is when, with attention to intellect and
moral laws, there is the development of the capacity of religion. It is
here humanity culminates—the development of the spirit in man. These
of the _highest_ class are lighted up from within by the Spirit of God.
By the inbreathing of the Almighty, they have understanding of things
unseen; they do not despise intellect, but intellect in them is warmed
and vivified by a divine brightness; they honor morality, and seek a
right standard for measuring its duties; they fall into the movements of
the Perfect Mind and the Perfect Love; they learn to renounce self, to
control the fleshly; they acquire a disposition that can forgive; they
are prompted to do good, and are enlarged with beneficence; they have
aptitude for spiritual enjoyments, and receive constantly new accessions
of joy and power, whereby they become fitted for those blissful regions
where love, purity, nobleness, peace, and benignity have place for ever.

Young man, just beginning your immortal existence, behold your true
destiny. Oh, for God’s sake and your own sake, do not fall short of it!
Here is the culminating point of humanity. Do not be degraded, and live
unworthy of yourself. This is the end of Christ’s gospel: not merely to
save, as a man is saved from fire or from drowning—just brought out of
the water or the flames alive; but to save by conducting a human spirit
to the victory over sin, self, and the world. “I am come,” said the
Saviour, “that they might have life, and that they might have it more
abundantly.”

This elevation to which I call you is not in opposition to other
attainments—it embraces them. Piety will not give the intellectual talent
which nature has withheld; but, if true, it will vastly improve whatever
intellect a man has. It will not supply high reasoning powers if they
were not there before; but it will save reason from that blindness of
conceit and prejudice whereby so many are fatally hindered and misled.
With piety, a man’s intellect will be keener, his understanding will be
sounder, his judgment will be wiser, and his tastes improved and refined.
Rich and Cobden is represented as having declared that he never felt
confidence in a man who was not possessed by religion; he was not at all
sure what action he would take. Myriads of facts confirm the observation
of the statesman. Of two poets, otherwise equal, the Christian is the
greater, of two statesmen, the Christian attains the more permanent fame;
of two artists equally gifted, the Christian takes the higher place; of
two merchants equally practical and far-seeing, the Christian reaches
the surest success. There were Arabian sheiks as magnanimous as Abraham;
but none acquired his ascendency over all times and nations. There were
in Egypt many learned men besides Joseph; but none so influential. There
were many great kings of the East besides David; but none reached his
elevation. There were many wise men in Babylon besides Daniel; but none
so illustrious. There were in his age many scholars like Paul; but none
who so powerfully affected humanity. There were many Saxon kings who
loved their country like Alfred; but none so great. There were in his
times many who loved liberty like Milton; but none whose writings are
more read in these. There have been many investigators of nature like Sir
Isaac Newton; but none so distinguished. There have been many soldiers
who have won splendid honors like Washington; but none whose name is
such a spell of might to a great nation as is his. There were many great
statesmen in England when this century commenced; but none who died so
popular and so honored as Wilberforce. There have been many princes who
have been cultured and benevolent; but none whose name “hereafter and for
all times” will be such “a household word” as that of Albert the Good.
_These were all men of sincere piety._ Ah, I might tell out a record of
names that would have towered to the loftiest heights; but around which
there are sad and awful memories through the absence of a governing and
master sentiment of the soul. No prejudice is so contradicted by facts
as that which conceives of piety as allied with weakness. Piety is the
nurse, the handmaid, the inspirer of all that can give man greatness. “A
man’s religion,” says Dr. Huntingdon very finely, “fertilizes the whole
field of his being. It makes his business safer, his scholarship wiser,
his manhood manlier, his joy healthier, his strength stronger. It is the
crown of his enterprise and the charm of his affections, the humility
of his learning, and the glory of his life. And because it has sight of
things not seen and eternal, it is the splendor, the transfiguration, and
the sanctity of things seen and temporal.”

Observe, however, it is not greatness to which I would urge you. There
is the _attractiveness_ of piety, which, in the humblest sphere you
can exemplify. Oh, the beauty and power of a man who has tranquillized
passion, has subdued the lower appetites, has acquired gentleness and
considerateness, amenity and affectionateness; and who, reposing in the
love of Christ, and taught by the Spirit of Christ, is having formed in
his life some transcript of the superhuman loveliness which dwelt in
Christ himself.

This, then, is the point to which I come. If you would have your nature
to reach the highest place of which it is capable, yield yourself to God.
You cannot create the good in yourself. You can no more form yourself to
the divine and heavenly than the rosebud can open its beauties without
sunlight or atmospheric moisture. It is your happiness to receive. It is
your privilege to open your nature that you may receive. The holy and
all-helpful Spirit will swiftly draw near at the voice of your sincere
cry to him. Myriads have proved this on earth: a multitude which no man
can number affirm it in heaven.

It was once my privilege to know one—the Rev. Jonathan Glyde of
Bradford—in whom the combination of excellencies I have sketched was
exemplified. His had been for many years the reach after this moral and
spiritual perfection; and he attained, as many admiringly witnessed,
his own ideal of gentleness and dignity, consideration for others and
abnegation of self, beautiful humility and scholarly attainment, saintly
purity and unfailing charity, childlike reliance upon the Saviour, and
unwearied zeal for his fellow-men. When he was dying he was heard gently
to murmur, “Higher, higher!” His attendants, misconceiving his meaning,
approached the head of his bed to raise the pillows. Seeing their
mistake, he fell back upon the Latin word, and with an ineffable smile,
raised his enfeebled hand, saying, “Excelsior, excelsior!” To his waiting
spirit the glimpse was given at that moment of the career of immortal
glory, growth, and blessedness which was then before him.

And now, in view of what has been said, let me add these counsels.

1. _Religion is the necessity of your existence._ If, like Cain, you had
stood at the beginning of the race, there might have been some excuse
for you in attempting to find happiness without God; but you stand with
the open book of six thousand years behind you. There has not been a
solitary case of a nation, or individual, who resolved to find permanent
happiness in sensual things, who has not been disappointed. Read history:
you will see how the experiment has been tried again and again, and has
always failed. Babylon tried it, with every advantage of Oriental luxury
and splendor, and failed. Greece tried it, with every advantage of art
and literature, and still the wisest men busied themselves to find the
lost treasure of human happiness. Rome tried it, with every advantage of
wealth and spectacle, and the more we pierce to the heart of society in
Rome’s proudest days, the more do we find despair preying there. England
tried it in the days of the second Charles. Puritanism had been silenced;
godliness was satirized on the stage; lust was the commodity of poets
and wits; license was the fashion; but the unrest and craving of society
grew deeper, louder, and more troubled, as rivalries, intrigues, and
licentiousness abounded.

It has been the same with individuals. You have been told of the gay Lord
Chesterfield recording at the close of an enviable life of fashion and
pleasure, “I am now wise enough to feel and attest the force of Solomon’s
reflections, that all is vanity and vexation of spirit.” Mr. Lewes tells
us in his life of Goethe, that the great poet wrote at thirty years of
age: “The period in which I have mingled with the world I dare not yet
trust myself to look at. God keep me, that I be not as those who spend
the day in complaining of headache, and the night in drinking the wine
which gives the headache.” In advanced age the celebrated skeptic said
of himself, “They have called me a child of fortune, nor have I any wish
to complain of the course of my life; yet it has been nothing but labor
and sorrow, and I may truly say that in seventy-five years I have not had
four weeks of true comfort. It was the constant rolling of a stone that
was always to be lifted anew.” To me, as a Christian, such a testimony is
inexpressibly affecting. In the seventh volume of “Gibbon’s History” you
will find a description of the founder of the city, palace, and gardens
of Zehra, three miles from Cordova. Three millions sterling were spent.
Sculptors and architects were invited from Constantinople. Nothing that
the world could render to minister to the tastes and passions of the
caliph was wanting. After his death this authentic memorial was found
in his cabinet: “I have now reigned above fifty years in victory or
peace; beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my enemies, and respected by my
allies. Riches, honors, power, and pleasure have waited on my call, nor
does any earthly blessing appear to have been wanting to my felicity. In
this situation I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine
happiness which have fallen to my lot: they amount to FOURTEEN! O man,
place not thy confidence in this present world.”

In mentioning these things, I have no desire to detract from the
real happiness there is in human life. There are a thousand sources
of enjoyment that are open to you. Life is joyous—it has its endless
gratifications; but I solemnly tell you that you will be utterly
disappointed if you seek happiness apart from personal goodness and from
God. Why should you ignore the testimony of all times? Why should you
not avail yourself of this universal experience? Why should you, by the
wreck of your own comfort, add your life to be another beacon of warning?
No doubt sin has its fascination; but if men whose opportunities were
greater than your own tell you that at “the end it biteth like a serpent
and stingeth like an adder,” is it not consummate folly for you to shut
your ears to the testimony? You are too good for the world; “you are
of too noble a make and too lofty a mien” to give yourself to any thing
lower than God. There was a young man starting in life, as you are. He
had not your advantages. He was surrounded by the licentiousness of a
corrupt paganism. He went wildly astray into vicious indulgence. Little
more than thirty years had gone over his head when he turned aside
from the gratifications of passion, and then he poured out his soul in
“confessions” which have come down to us, and which tell us in eloquent,
pathetic tones that man is doomed to an unsatisfied craving till he turns
to know, to love, and to serve God. You may be able to read these noble
Latin words which have been well quoted by a university preacher from
the great Augustine’s first confession: “_Fecisti nos ad Te, Domine, et
inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in Te._”

2. _Take heed of the first wrong step._ In the Life of the late Mr.
Baines, Member of Parliament for Leeds, it is recorded that one day
he was watching an apprentice, whose habits were doubtful, fold a
newspaper. At the first fold there was a wrinkle, and at every succeeding
fold the wrinkle grew worse and more unmanageable. Mr. Baines said
significantly, “Jem, it is a bad thing to begin wrong.” The poor fellow
found it so, for he soon after fell a victim to his vices. “Who ever was
content with one sin?” said a heathen moralist. There are, indeed, young
men who, in an unguarded moment, have gone into scenes of temptation, and
have turned away with horror and recoil, like a bird that, having strayed
into the poisonous atmosphere of chemical works, has rushed back quickly
to the pure air of heaven. But such cases are the exceptions. There is a
witchery about sin. One lie demands a second to back it; and thus a man
becomes that most contemptible and hopeless of men, a confirmed liar. A
great preacher, the late Dr. Winter Hamilton, once said that he had known
men of all other kinds of wickedness converted; but a confirmed liar he
had never known converted. One night in a music and dancing saloon may
so pollute the imagination as to break down the barriers of years. One
throw at a gaming-table, one bet on a race, may so excite the craving
for this perilous speculation that it may be followed by the frenzy
and suffering of years of gambling. One indulgence of the lusts of the
flesh may so damn a man in his own eyes that in a year he may be utterly
foul. Dear young man, nothing deadens the conscience so much as sin;
nothing creates a desire for repetition so much as sin; nothing so rises
in its demands from every concession made to it so much as sin. Among
the most striking things in our language is a sentence of Jeremy Taylor
on the progress of sin: “Sin startles a man—that is, the first step;
then it becomes pleasing; then it becomes easy; then delightful, then
frequent; then habitual, then confirmed; then the man is impenitent, then
obstinate; then resolves never to repent, and then is damned.” My young
brother, it is in mercy that our heavenly Father sweeps away all the
trifling with sin by those strong but loving words, “Thou shalt _not_.”
Our poor self rises; passion raises its tempest of desire; experts in
vice solicit; the wrong waits to claim us and hold dominion over us, and
our good God, who sees the end, says, “Go not in the way of evil men;
avoid it, pass not by it, turn from it, and pass away.” It is just now,
when boyhood is over, that you are to gain the victory. Hearken to that
true man within you. Listen to that protest of God’s Spirit in your soul.
Resolve to obey and conquer, and the victory will make you stronger, and
make temptation weaker. No one, however, can win the victory for you. The
test to prove whether you will be ignoble or noble, is for you to grapple
with. With the first temptation, then, contend; for it may be a fight for
life or death.

I know there is a maxim very common that “a young fellow must sow his
wild oats.” They shall not be my words that reply to that saying. They
shall be those of a man who knows the world, and an ardent lover of
the pure pleasures of the world. “In all the range of accepted British
maxims,” says Mr. Thomas Hughes, M. P., “there is none, take it all in
all, more thoroughly abominable than this one as to the sowing of wild
oats. Look at it on which side you will, and I will defy you to make
any thing but a devil’s maxim of it. What a man, be he young, old, or
middle-aged, sows, _that_, and nothing else, shall he reap. The one only
thing to do with wild oats, is to put them carefully into the hottest
part of the fire, and get them burnt to dust, every seed of them. If you
sow them, no matter in what ground, up they will come, with long tough
roots like couch-grass, and luxuriant stalks and leaves, as sure as there
is a sun in heaven—a crop which it turns one’s heart cold to think of.
The devil, too, whose special crop they are, will see that they thrive,
and you, and nobody else, will have to reap them; and no common reaping
will get them out of the soul, which must be dug down deep again and
again. Well for you if with all your care you can make the ground sweet
again by your dying day. ‘Boys will be boys’ is not much better, but that
has a true side to it; but this encouragement to the sowing of wild oats
is simply devilish, for it means that a young man is to give way to the
temptations and follow the lusts of his age.”

As I am in these addresses to picture life as it is, and to let facts
speak, I will still add corroborative instances that have fallen under
my own observation. I feel sure that hundreds of young men would have
shunned vice if facts had been told them of its issues. They have few to
tell them. It is intensely disagreeable to tell them. But I cannot see
young men coming into our great cities without forewarning them of the
rocks ahead of them. While these sheets were passing through the press,
I had a most painful illustration of the ruin and sorrow following upon
the indulgence of sin. A young man came to London, bearing with him the
confidence and affection of a godly and afflicted mother, the pride of a
Christian father, and the yearning love of pure and beautiful sisters.
Because of his intelligence and probity, he was placed in a situation
of trust, and went on well while the thought of home and its sanctities
was with him. The tempter tried her arts, and caught him in her wiles.
The expenses of the dancing-room and the habits it led to were beyond
his limit of wealth. He took from intrusted money; the embezzlement was
not at first discovered. He grew confident. Satan wrapped blinding folds
around him. Alas, the success was brief. From a gloomy prison he sent
up a message to ask my prayers for him. I do not know him. None will
know him through this reference. At twenty-one he has brought a dark
shadow over his life-dawn. Deep as is the darkness, it may be God’s only
means of answering his mother’s prayers. Alas, for five years of his
imprisonment has that mother’s heart to be riven!

When I was a minister in Leeds, a fine youth came to that town. He was a
native of a far-off land. He came to acquire mechanical knowledge more
perfectly prior to becoming head of a great house. Wealth and possessions
were before him. An attached family circle delighted in him. He was
amiable, fascinating, and naturally generous. A group of wild young men
determined to allure him to pleasure and sin. He fell into the snare.
The billiard-room was visited; it led to the tavern, and then to the
brothel. His kind employer remonstrated with him and pointed out the
consequences of his courses. It was of no avail. He had consulted the
“secret physician,” or, rather, quack. A severe cold brought to a climax
his virulent disorder. His magnificent form was tossed upon a bed of
anguish. Loved ones hastened over the sea to seek to save him. It could
not be. So loathsome was his chamber that nurses could hardly be secured
to attend him, and those most loving him rushed overpowered from his
bedside. His pearly teeth all dropped out, and at length, decayed and
agonized, he died a dreadful, hopeless death.

3. _Be courageous._ I have spoken of the perils of great cities. I
might speak of their grand opportunities. They are the schools for the
highest education of which man is capable. They have their thousand
instrumentalities for noble development. They have their incitements to
the most pleasurable excitation. They bring a collision of mind largely
beneficial. They open channels for benevolence and greatness as no other
places do. But my advice is, let no man come to a great city without
courage. If he is weak, yielding, cowardly, let him not venture upon the
encounters of a city life. Let a youth aim to live a godly life, and
the sluggish will sneer, the empty-souled will laugh, the wicked will
throw out sarcasms. Woe to the man who cannot brave the laugh of fools.
My friend, it is the first step that costs. My observation leads me to
say that fast and depraved men, with all their brag, are the greatest
cowards. They like to make conquest of the inexperienced, but their
forced laugh very poorly covers the secret awe they have of the manly
and the firm. They know what is the right thing to do, spite of their
sarcasms. Do I say, Trust in yourself? By no means; if you wish to be
brave, God will provide you armor. If, on the other hand, you go into
the world saying, “I am not of the sort that yield; I am, afraid of no
danger,” then let me say there is fear for this self-confidence. It is
a proverb we need to repeat to ourselves: “Seest thou a man wise in his
own conceit, there is more hope of a fool than of him.” But be sure, my
young brother, God is interested in your going the right way. He loves
to help those who call upon him. I think of David as a young man crying
to his pious mother’s God: “Save the son of thy handmaid.” Morning by
morning ask God to arm you from head to foot, and then be strong and
courageous.

4. Having decided on the right course, _go forward_. That right course is
before you. No past guilt of yours is a barrier. “Christ has put away sin
by the sacrifice of himself.” There is an open pathway of reconciliation
on which you may walk. But oh, for God’s sake and your own sake, when
you have found that path, do not stand still. I have known young men who
started well: their standard was high; their ideal of what Christianity
demanded was just and lofty. They resolved they would scorn the mean,
the money-loving, the selfish in life. They wound their conscience up
to that point. But there the finger stopped, just at that figure: it
told out still what their ideal had been at starting. And this was all;
the clock did not go. They now have no sound, no tone about them. They
still say they scorn the mean, without aiming to _do_ noble things; they
still tell you they hate avarice, but they are not benevolent; they have
their theories about selfish Christians, but none bless them for their
self-renouncing deeds. This is of all things the most pitiable, that a
man should sink lower than his own standard, and go through life false to
himself.

                “To thine own self be true;
    And it must follow, as the night to day,
    Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

I surely need not say, Turn not back. Should the eagle which has soared
higher than his compeers break his pinion, he would drop lower than the
lowest. It is related that in the American War of Independence, the army
of Washington had crossed a bridge over a deep river. With the river
behind and the enemy in front, the great general proposed the question to
his officers: “Shall we burn the bridge?” “Burn it!” said the staff; “we
may want it for a retreat.” “Retreat!” said Washington; “if that is the
only reason for retaining it, then it must perish.” “Burn the bridge!”
was his instant order; and it was laid in ashes.

5. _Cultivate helps to the spiritual life._ That life cannot take care
of itself. It sprung forth first to meet the touch of God’s Spirit, and
it can only grow and become strong by communion with the Spirit. You see
some who appeared to be religious youths at fourteen, and who are worldly
at twenty. No doubt there were fine religious susceptibilities which
were quickened into activity at the former period, and which gave them
vantage ground for a fine start; but they lived on themselves, which is
the same as feeding the body upon emptiness. No wonder their apparent
religious life should have died. It is very much to be deplored, that
with the facilities which are afforded to many through early closing
movements, the opportunities for social religious culture should be
passed by. Remember the secret of growth I have indicated—coöperation
with God. When a man has saplings in his orchard which bear only wild
fruit, like a good orchardist he seeks to improve them by grafting. He
cuts his grafts from a last year’s growth of wood; takes care that they
do not evaporate their moisture; then on the stocks grafts his scions If
a sapling is unbenefited; if the wood above the graft is just like the
wood below, which it ought not to be; or if the fruit be of a mongrel
kind, partly of the original stock and partly of the scion, what will he
do? Try again, it may be. But if, after repeated trials, he has the same
result, he will reject his unprofitable stocks, and turn his attention
to fresh young trees. This is Christ’s law of spiritual life. That which
beareth not fruit receiveth no more attention from the husbandman. “When
a young man has much given to him—religious training, divine movements on
his soul, glimpses of the beauty and blessedness of a religious life—if
then there is a self-confidence, badness of heart, levity with Scripture,
negligence in prayer, trifling with holy things, indifference to growth,
then Christ suspends the vital influences. The branch remains, but it
is sapless, lifeless, joyless. If the little life is in thy heart, my
brother, let me implore thee to seek its growth by prayer, by public
and social worship, by seeking acquaintance with the mind of the Spirit
in holy Scripture. The _Times_ newspaper—and the testimony of a secular
journal may have weight on this matter—said not long ago in a leader: “We
question if any person of any class ever read the Scriptures regularly
and thoroughly without being or becoming not only religious, but sensible
and consistent.”

6. _Ally yourself with the like-minded._ You will take your character
from your chosen companions. You may not mean it, but you cannot help
it. “He that walketh with wise men will be wise,” saith the proverb,
and the reverse side is true also. As a religious young man you cannot
stand alone. Associate yourself with the aspiring. Seek the sympathy and
helpfulness of a Christian church. You will not do this because you are
strong, but because you feel weak. You will go into a church not because
you are wise and holy, but because you need prayers, and the impulse
of mutual fellowship. There is a most unreasoning prejudice in this age
against church communion. “Do not be a sectary,” you will be told. You
may reply: “There never has been an age in England when the very best,
holiest, and most useful men were not counted sectaries.” The grandest
works which have gone to save and bless the world have been done by
Christian denominations; the noblest of men have been in firm alliance
with some Christian church. The outsiders have mostly been the critics,
the sentimental, and the ineffective. As a young man, a Christian
organization offers a grand scene for your labors and for your dignified
influence.

It may be you feel you cannot take your place among the righteous. Let
me then conjure you not to let a day pass without resolving that you
will give yourself in loyalty through Christ unto God. He is calling
you through these words to glory and virtue. He strives with you to win
your love. His garments have been dyed in blood for your salvation. He
bows himself to you and deigns to knock at the door of your heart.
Oh, for the sake of what is holiest, dearest, infinite, do not resist
his pleadings. On this the starting-point of your manhood, you are in
your own power. God appeals to you and says: “I set before you life and
death.” The end of life now seems far off. Believe me it will come sooner
far than you think. Ceaselessly, noiselessly, swiftly will life pass.
Your life must be looked back upon. If, after your opportunities, it is
proved to have been a life of waste and evil influence, heavier will
be your remorse and doom. May God in mercy grant that yours may be the
place among the consecrated ones who have blessed humanity, and who now
know the meaning and grandeur of a destiny that called them to glory and
immortality.

Thus do I lay these counsels before you, my friend, as you enter upon
life. They have been written amid the demands of a large charge and the
wearying claims of public life. They might have been better. But they
are the outpouring of an intensely anxious heart. Looking back upon the
past, I feel, with thousands more, that the great boon of existence
was the disposition to ally my nature with Christ’s when eighteen years
of age. From that time with what inexpressible benignity, patience, and
sympathy, has Christ helped me! And now, should I be called to no other
service, in the closing moments of life the hope that these few words had
induced some young men to choose Christ and all his mighty love, would
be most precious and grateful to my heart. This I know, that if old age
is welcomed when it brings to Christ only the relics of a wasted life;
for you, when you offer him the force of your will, the glow of your
affections, the opening powers of your intellect, for you there will be
more than welcome; there will be “lavish acknowledgment.” He will deign
to call it “the kindness of your youth,” which he will “remember” for
ever.




FOOTNOTES


[1] There is a sin of which I can hint only to you. Alas, its terrible
temptations and its awful consequences are becoming frightful. It is
not safe to omit notice in an appeal to a young man who may be entering
life in a great city. If you could know the little that has come to my
knowledge, your very hairs would stand on end. I could tell you of the
finest physical constitutions, which, after twelve months’ tampering with
this perilous fascination, have become pitiable wrecks of disease. I
could tell you, on medical authority, of men now dragging out a useless
existence, with reason dethroned, and drivelling in idiotcy. And the
punishment once done to the flesh does not depart. Life ends in early
death, or is a long suffering of humiliation; yea, worse still, the
suffering is perpetuated in the third and fourth generations. Young men
starting in life have none to tell them these things, therefore I have
forced myself to the hateful task. The displeasure of God against this
sin is awful. What would you think of a man who should pluck a flower
from a yawning chasm, when there were ninety-nine chances to one that he
would fall into the abyss below, and even if extricated, be scarred and
begrimed to the end of his days?

[2] In Memoriam, p. 143.

[3] Not very long since, a public lecturer was proceeding to Sheffield,
and in a railway train astounded me by arguing that the apostle Paul
preached the gospel before Jesus Christ was crucified. A Sunday-scholar
of seven years of age would have taught him better. I was lately in a
large meeting in Pentonville, when an intelligent man, who avowed himself
a skeptic, who had read Mr. Buckle’s “History of Civilization,” declared
that men who believed the Bible could never be expected to attend to
man’s social condition; for that Christ taught, in John 6, that we were
“not to labor for the meat which perisheth.” Now mark, the very verse
before the one quoted tells us that a multitude had followed Christ, not
at all caring for what he would teach them, but because he had fed them
with loaves and fishes. Their miserable motive he exposed, and bid them
labor for meat which endured unto everlasting life. Suppose a son of this
skeptic had taken what professed to be a letter from his mother, and
singled out a clause from its context to bring the letter into contempt
before a meeting, what would that father have called such a son? A
scoundrel. God probably pities him as he would not his son. But let young
men take heed of reasoning which is not merely a reproach to candor, but
to common intelligence.

[4] See Quarterly Journal of Geological Society, No. 86, p. 88. See note,
p. 129.




In Business

Rev. J. D. Wells, D. D.




CONTENTS.


                 CHAPTER I.

    Boys                               PAGE 7

                CHAPTER II.

    Employers in Relation to Boys           9

                CHAPTER III.

    Boys in Relation to Employers          13

                CHAPTER IV.

    Young Men and Success                  22

                 CHAPTER V.

    Other Conditions of Success            32




INTRODUCTION.


Several years ago a man, now venerable for age and character, gave
the writer some valuable hints about boys and young men in relation
to business. He had himself begun life a poor boy, and achieved large
success. Coming to New York more than sixty years ago, he was familiar
with all the changes in methods of doing business up to the time then
present. Nor has he ceased to be active in the affairs of a large concern
at this later day. The passing years have made him old and have not
left me young. The thoughts he gave me, supplemented by my own reading,
observation and reflection, move me to set down some things that may be
helpful not only to the classes of persons already referred to, but to
others as well.

The great change in business methods does not warrant any change in the
characters and habits of those who have a right to expect success in any
true meaning of the word.

I would gladly speak a helpful word to the thousands of boys and young
men who are looking hopefully into the future, and yet may not have in
mind the true conditions of well-doing for themselves or their employers.




Boys and Young Men in Relation to Business.




CHAPTER I.

_BOYS._


If there were no boys there would be no young men and no old men. To
this truism add the saying, “The boy is the father of the man,” and our
subject has dignity and greatness at the outset. There may be aspects of
it that provoke merriment; but there are more of a different character,
and we are kept sober-minded in view of them.

The boy on shipboard is the “monkey.” The boy among types and presses
is the “printer’s devil.” The boy at school is “Jack,” or “Bill,” or
“Dick,” “hail-fellow well met,” and a peer among peers. The boy in
college, if any boys go to college, is a “Freshman,” bound—if not happily
emancipated of late—to serve the learned “Sophomore,” or take a ducking,
or something worse, for his disobedience.

In business the boy is just what his character, his companions and his
employers make of him. He may be a butt of ridicule, or a greenhorn to
be ripened into smartness and wickedness by those who are older and
wiser and worse than himself. He may be a poor drudge, to sweep and run
of errands, which may be all right; or to suffer untold indignities and
cruelties, with no uplifting to a better future and very little pay for
very much work, which is all wrong.

Or, by way of contrast, he may be treated from the start as having in him
the germ of real greatness, the undeveloped qualities of a man yet to be
acknowledged as the peer of those he serves, and the possible superior
of them all. No one but God knows what may be hid and struggling for
opportunity and recognition and reward in the obscurest little fellow who
takes the lowest place in any store or office or shop.




CHAPTER II.

_EMPLOYERS IN RELATION TO BOYS._


I do not think the first thing to be considered is what a boy may do for
his employers, but rather what they may do for him, and so, at last, for
themselves through him. In all ordinary circumstances they can mould him
to their will. They are the masters, he is the servant. They are strong,
he is weak. If they do not recognize their obligation to him, in the
relation to which they invite and receive him, they ought not to complain
of his failures in duty to them. As well expect a son to know and meet
his duties to his parents while they utterly fail to recognize theirs to
him.

If an employer requires a boy to do what in his home or the sanctuary he
has learned he must not do, and if he requires him to do the forbidden
thing on pain of losing his place or his pay, the requirement is not
only a grievous wrong in itself, but an outrage upon the inalienable
rights of the boy. Children are required to obey their parents only
“in the Lord.” No man is great enough to lord it over his own child’s
conscience. And this great principle holds in the relation of employers
to their servants of all ages and grades.

Boys sell their time and service to their masters. They cannot sell their
conscience, soul, and body. They must do right if they lose a thousand
places in succession and starve to death for want of work. I can think of
no persecution more cruel and infamous than that which is practised upon
boys just starting on their career for life, here and hereafter, when
they are required to practise deceit; to say things that are not true
about goods to be sold, or in any other way to debauch conscience. The
penalty of disobedience may be sending them home to widowed mothers or
orphaned sisters without recommendation to any other place of business.
This is martyrdom with a vengeance, and it is by no means uncommon. I
have in mind glaring instances that have come under my own observation.
A man now belonging to an old and wealthy business house was thrust out
of his place when a youth because he refused to sell goods damaged in a
vital though hidden part as goods in perfect order.

Another, in a position of great responsibility and usefulness for a
number of years in a heathen land, when a boy served his employer
faithfully six days in the week, and was required to sell his goods on
the Sabbath. His conscience forbade this and he was discharged, with very
serious consequences for a time.

These are specimens of classes. But it is always safe and wise for boys
firmly and respectfully to resist human authority in all such cases.

There is another great wrong to boys, to wit, leaving them at the mercy
of subordinates who hold positions grading all the way from those held
by the boys themselves, to those just below the high positions of the
employers. I have seen something of this petty tyranny; good boys harried
into desperation or pushed and badgered into immoralities and the loss of
self-respect.

Happy are the boys who go from their homes to the care of good men,
and to the companionship of co-workers who help them to success by
instruction and example.




CHAPTER III.

_BOYS IN RELATION TO EMPLOYERS._


Thus far I have written some plain things about employers in relation
to boys. With equal plainness I now write of boys in relation to their
employers.

Clearly they must always do right even if the stars fall. It is weak and
contemptible to be eye-servants, showing all diligence in the presence
of employers, but lapsing into idleness, carelessness or mischief when
they disappear. In the long run boys that always do right will do well.
The hearts of their employers can safely trust in them. If for no higher
reason than their own interests they will advance them from one position
to another of responsibility and emolument.

But other reasons will prevail. Personal attachments will be formed. Men
of business are commonly men of heart. They have sons of their own and
cannot help admiring the excellencies of other people’s sons. It is not
uncommon to hear them boast of the virtues of boys employed by them.
Some time ago I was in an office and within a few moments two gentlemen
of the firm called my attention to a lad who was moving quietly about,
absorbed in the duties of his calling. They spoke with great interest of
his fidelity and efficiency in relation to them; of his great self-denial
in order to minister to the comfort of his family; and of his brilliant
prospects.

There is a proverb as true as when written, “A wise servant shall
have rule over a son that causeth shame, and shall have part of
the inheritance among the brethren.” There is another which is not
infrequently verified, and suggests a very pleasant way in which boys
grown to manhood sometimes share in the “inheritance among the brethren;”
it is this: “He that delicately bringeth up his servant from a child
shall have him become his son at length.”

Again, boys must give their best thought and energies in business hours
to the interests of their employers. Nor should they forget or in any
way endanger those interests out of business hours. They are in and of
the concern. They represent it. Its reputation attaches to them and
theirs to it. It may be amusing, but it is pleasant, and suggestive of a
bright future, to hear a boy just beginning his business life speaking
loftily of “our house.” He belongs to its personnel. His life mingles
with its life. It is for his interest to give much thought, at all
proper times, to the duties of his station. If, by extra labor adding to
his qualifications for business, he can become more useful than he was
expected or is required to be, he may cut off weary months and even years
that must otherwise lie between him and higher service and better pay. I
knew a boy who in this way passed over the heads of several older than
himself, and in early manhood fairly won a position which others never
reached. As a rule, I think boys may count on being promoted when they
have outgrown the places which they wish to leave. If they can sweep
stores and set things in order better than others, and run of errands
with swifter feet, and acquaint themselves with streets and places of
business quicker than others, they will not have to do these things for a
long time. Higher service awaits them, and they will find that the habits
of thoroughness and dispatch already formed are worth more and more as
they advance to higher and more responsible positions.

In all things right, boys must sink their wills in the wills of their
employers. This is not to become slaves. Children have safest and
sweetest liberty in obeying their parents; scholars their teachers;
soldiers their commanders. In the shop, the office, the store, there must
be authority on the one hand and obedience on the other. Boys should
rejoice that above them there are men who, once boys like themselves,
are now wise enough and kind enough to assign them their duties and to
guide them in the way to success, and firm enough to require obedience
to their directions. Prompt and cheerful obedience will not fail,
in ordinary circumstances, to attract the attention and secure the
approbation of employers. Wise boys will watch for opportunities to make
themselves useful, gladly doing what has not occurred to anyone else and
yet everyone will be glad to have done; and if they can do all to please
Him who seeth in secret and rewardeth openly, rather than for any lower
motive, they are to be congratulated as having made a right start not
only for this life but for that which is to come.

“It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth.” A great but
very sad prophet wrote these familiar words long ago, but they have lost
none of their truth. If a thousand boys, already in business or about to
begin their business lives, were reading the words I write, I would put
all possible emphasis in what follows: do not fear any amount of work,
or any kind, lying fairly within your power. I have been an office-boy,
doing many things, besides writing, that were not easy or pleasant. I
know that many things needing to be done may be left undone without
incurring blame. But he that does them wins the approval of his own
conscience and the favor of men. If one does unpleasant things cheerfully
they lose half of their unpleasantness, and will not have to be done many
times.

It is mean to shirk, and it never pays. The ease it brings for the moment
is punished by long drudgery, and he that habitually shirks may look back
at the end of a miserable life with unavailing regrets upon the weakness
and neglect of his early years. Even a horse that will not draw his part
of a reasonable load is despised and whipped.

Blessings on the good boys that have pluck and purpose to succeed;
and may all that are otherwise become like them, as doubtless many of
them mean to do. “You will be proud of us one of these days,” was the
assurance of a bright but mischievous boy to an anxious teacher pleading
with him and his companions to mend their ways. A boy of this kind who
gave me great solicitude a few years ago, as I was his pastor and the
teacher of his Sunday-school class, came suddenly under the power of the
truth. Deeply convicted of sin, and coming to Christ on his invitation,
he was soon rejoicing in the hope of pardon and eternal life. He is
now the efficient superintendent of a Sunday-school and bears a most
important office in the church of which he is a beloved member.

“I have a noble boy,” said a deck-hand on a ferryboat as I fell into
conversation with him. Then he gave me his history. From his school days
to full manhood his career was honorable and his life in and out of his
church relations very useful. To the father he was still his “boy” and
his pride.

Boys, you are all old enough to know that somewhere you will live
forever. The characters you form here will go with you into the world and
the life to come. If they are right here, and now, they will be right
forever and grow better and better. If they are wrong here, and continue
so till God calls you away, early or late, they will be wrong always and
wax worse and worse. Boys do not all live to become old men—or even young
men. There is just one way of starting right and being in the right way
until God calls you to a better world. Listen to the sweet words that
you have often heard: “I love them that love me, and those that seek me
early shall find me.” Determine to be boy Christians. Believe that Jesus
Christ, the only Saviour, loves you. He is able and willing to save you
from the sins of your youth. If you hear and obey his loving call he will
guide and guard you safely until you are forever with him and like him.
Believe that you need him every hour and moment. Trust him to do what he
promises. Keep company with those who delight in his service. Fear God
and keep his commandments. “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.”
Cling to your Sunday-school and church. Confess Jesus Christ before men,
and he will confess you before his Father and the angels. If irreligious
boys make fun of you, because they think you have given up all the
pleasures of boy-life, let them know that the peace which God gives you
is far better than all their forbidden pleasures, and do what you can to
win them from their evil ways to a true and blessed life.

In any case, boys, be sure that the favor of God, which is life, and his
lovingkindness, which is better than life, will fit you for the truest
and best success in business. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he
will direct your steps: God will be your patron and friend.




CHAPTER IV.

_YOUNG MEN AND SUCCESS._


The line between boys and young men is invisible. Those who pass it
cannot tell where it lies. But the time comes when they no longer admit
to themselves or others that they are boys. They bear about the pleasant
consciousness that they are nearer the heart of a business life than
they were a while before. They may be apprentices, collectors, entry
clerks, shipping clerks, bookkeepers, salesmen behind the counter, or
on the road, but they are no longer boys and they are not yet partners.
A numerous class, they will become largely the business men of the next
generation. Even now they represent immense personal, domestic and public
interests. Who can think of them without emotion! It does not require
a broad sweep of observation and recollection to bring into view from
the two extremes young men who have utterly failed and others who have
won honorable success; those who have sealed their own doom and dragged
others down with them to an abyss of shame and misery, and those who have
become princes in the earth.

It is worth asking at the outset what meaning we ought to attach to the
words “success” and “failure” in business.

We do not account him successful who gains large wealth, leaving it to
his family and even to public institutions of great usefulness, but who
does it at the cost of personal integrity, character and reputation. We
do not need examples of men who have grown rich by doubtful methods of
business, by perversion of office and trust funds, and who have already
sunk or are now sinking into depths of infamy and woe opened by their own
hands.

Nor is he successful who gains wealth honestly, and hoards it—against
all the claims of humanity and the revealed will of God—until his riches
are corrupted, his gold and silver cankered, the rust of them even now,
before the last day, eating his flesh as it were fire.

Men utterly fail, though possessed of millions, who make shipwreck of
character in the sight of their Maker and their fellow-men.

Many fail for lack of qualities and habits, and, it may be,
opportunities, that condition success. But _they do not_ fail who use
all diligence, and their best wisdom and opportunity, and yet become
poor without the loss of a good conscience toward God and man. And they
certainly succeed who amass wealth or a competency while maintaining
their integrity in relation to God and their honor among men.

It may be well to state here some of the well-ascertained facts in regard
to the percentage of success and failure in business, using the words in
their most limited meaning.

Only from three to five in every hundred men who embark in business
have large and permanent success. And these are not chiefly those who
begin with large capital. For the most part they are men who have been
architects of their own fortunes. Beginning as boys on low wages, and
passing through all grades of advancement from the lowest to the highest,
they have at last become strong enough to make their own terms with those
who have gladly recognized their ability and integrity as the equivalent
of large capital; or without such aid they have worked their way to
splendid success.

About ten out of a hundred have moderate success. Without aspiring to the
rank of millionaires they have an abundance for personal and family use,
and are able to share freely, if so inclined, in the beneficence of their
times.

The remaining eighty-five in a hundred are on a sliding scale from
partial success to utter failure. Leaving out of view all the cases
in which men of integrity and ability fail by reason of unavoidable
calamity, or lack of opportunity, how shall we account for the large
percentage of failures? And as the percentage continues from year to
year, and perhaps increases from generation to generation, it seems clear
that the reasons are permanent and powerful.

It certainly throws a deep shadow over households and communities to
think that young men have before them such gloomy prospects. Can we not
brighten them? Must every hundred young men, full of the strength and
enterprise belonging to their age, advance toward the goal of their
ambition under the depressing thought that only from five to twenty are
likely to win prizes? At best the cares and responsibilities and risks
of business men are very great. But I do not believe that circumstances
external to themselves control the business destiny of young men. They
may avoid disastrous failure and win success. At least a very large
percentage of them may win the wholesome success which consists in having
neither poverty nor riches; for this after all may be welcomed as the
safest and best condition. But they may also be prepared by excellence
of character, and by habits of business and of life, for the possession
and use of large wealth, under the great responsibility of stewards who
are yet to give account to the real Proprietor of all the treasures in
the world.

It should be remembered that young men may succeed as clerks and utterly
fail as the responsible heads of business concerns. For this reason the
conditions of success, of which I am about to write, have reference
largely to times beyond the years of apprenticeship and subordination.

Young men may enjoy the confidence of their employers while they are
disqualifying themselves for independent action. Devotion to their
interests may secure rapid advancement in positions and salaries. They
may be extravagant and immoral, and yet have qualities that cover their
faults and commend them to favor. While they remain under the direction
and control of men better and stronger than themselves they may be
congratulated as already successful, while they are bearing about in
their own persons all the conditions of sure and disastrous failure.

The first and fundamental condition of real and permanent success is good
character. This may be set down without qualification. Character is an
engraving. A good character answers to a divine ideal or pattern. It is
not made in a day, and if marred it can be restored. Bearing the deep
cuts and finer lines of truth and righteousness and pureness, it will
bear the violence of temptation in private, social, and business life,
and the severer testing of the last day.

Of course such a character is secretly and openly religious. Only when
young men consent to commit the keeping of their souls and bodies to
Jesus Christ, and to bear any cross that in his love and faithfulness he
may lay upon them, can they be strong in the Lord and the power of his
might.

How suggestive the words of the disciple whom Jesus loved with a
peculiar personal affection: “I have written unto you, young men, because
ye are strong, and the word of God abideth in you, and ye have overcome
the wicked one. Love not the world, neither the things that are in the
world.”

I hope no young man searching for the conditions of success in his
business life, if he reads these pages, will make light of this, which
is first and most important of all. That cannot be called success which
secures more than heart can wish for the life that now is, and not the
life to come. “Look well to thy goings,” was the earnest counsel of one
who knew well the dangers of the young man. “Look well to thy goings; it
is a narrow path. Look well to thy goings; it is a new path. Look well
to thy goings; it is a slippery path. Look well to thy goings; it is an
eventful path.”

In a long life I have seen many young men begin a business career with
great advantages and brilliant prospects, but their light went out in
darkness because they did not cleanse their ways by taking heed thereto
according to God’s word.

But I have also seen and now have in full view young men who early sought
refuge from their sins, and from all the perils of life, by coming
frankly to Jesus Christ in their conscious need. Invited to his presence,
and assured of his love and help, they took him at his word and found
rest to their souls. There is no harmless lawful pleasure that is denied
them. The peace of God is in their hearts. The service to which they are
called brings its own reward. The joy of the Lord is their strength. They
confess Christ as their Saviour and look forward to the momentous time
when he will fulfil his word and openly confess them. They keep company
with those who bear the Christian name, and give the full vigor of their
young manhood to well-doing in their daily business and in all the
relations of life.

Ask them if they are in bonds that they wish to break. You will get a
quick and emphatic answer: “Ours is the liberty of doing right because we
love to; and that is the glorious liberty of the children of God.”




CHAPTER V.

_OTHER CONDITIONS OF SUCCESS._


It does not follow, however, that a good moral or religious character by
itself will ensure success in the business of life; one must have certain
well-known qualifications and habits, and the reputation of possessing
them.

1. Reputation. Probably it stands next to character, if a young man
is to depend upon others for help in his work. Character is what one
is in himself and before God; reputation is what others take him to
be. A bad reputation certainly blocks the way to success. A good name
among business men is the equivalent of capital. Every young man who is
starting in business for himself must rely upon older men to help him
on his way. They have watched others closely. They have seen successive
generations of young men come to the front, and climb the hill of
difficulty till they have reached positions of safety and honor, or go
down to the abyss of dishonor and misery. In a word, watching others
closely they have accumulated facts that make it easy for them to
forecast the future of younger men with marvelous certainty. They are as
sensitive to the outward appearance and the known or suspected habits of
those who approach them for favors in trade as mercury to the changes
of temperature. No young man can afford to have the reputation of being
extravagant, or reckless, or mean, or untrue to his word. He cannot even
appear to be such without danger to his credit, on which to so large an
extent, as business is done, success must depend.

An acquaintance of my own came to the city a youth without capital. He
was honest, frugal, industrious, and of firm will. Having begun business
in a small way, and mostly on credit, he was invited by a friend—after
business hours—to ride beyond the limits of the city behind a fast horse
and with a fine turn-out. He accepted the invitation, but found the
pleasure of the ride reduced to a minimum by the tormenting thought that
he might be seen by some of the men who had given him credit.

In a new firm, with very large capital, one of the younger partners
secretly bought a horse. A senior partner learning the fact quietly
informed him by letter that his early extravagance would hurt the
reputation of the house.

It may be a hit at our times, but I have seen it stated that business men
sometimes inquire of persons seeking advanced positions whether they have
already supplied themselves with such trifles as elegant jewelry and fast
horses, hardly daring to risk employing them if these things are yet to
be secured.

It remains a truth that needs to be made very emphatic that young men
laying their plans for success in business, whether as subordinates or
principals, must look well to their reputation.

Are they given to billiards? There are many reasons why they would do
well to limit their indulgence. Of one thing at least they cannot afford
to make light: conservative men older and wiser than themselves, on
whose favor they must depend for a while at least, look with distrust on
young men who indulge largely in this game, and especially in not very
reputable places.

A young man drinks beer, wine, whisky or brandy with his dinner. This
habit will grow upon him. His young blood needs no quicker rush than
it has. If he gives it the force of such a stimulant when he is young
he will be old before his time, and never enjoy the full confidence of
men with whom he wishes to stand well and without whose favor he cannot
succeed. He may not spend half his income in extravagance but other
people cannot be sure of this, and he has need both to deserve and keep
their confidence. Credit is the equivalent of reputation. It may be hurt
by not saving at the outset and increasing capital. In that case one
must pay more for goods than men who have better credit. Or he may not
be able to buy at all of men who know him well and have the goods he
needs. Then he must buy of others goods that will not suit his customers;
and so his lack of credit or loss of reputation will bring him to speedy
grief. The first bad year in the business would leave him like a vessel
that hardly floats when the tide is at the full, but sticks fast in the
mud at the first of the ebb.

2. Another condition of success is diligence. Mark the word. It is
not the precise equivalent of industry. It implies choice, selection,
delight. One needs to have true delight and enthusiasm in his business.
Therefore the great importance of choosing wisely at the outset. We pity
men and women who in their babyhood had inflicted upon them fanciful
names, but this is nothing to the blunder of putting a son to a business
in which through his whole life he can take no delight. His only relief
is to set himself, with all possible energy and enterprise, to lift his
business, supposing it to be right in itself, up to a plane so high that
he can sincerely rejoice in his achievement, as very difficult to make
but of great worth when it is made.

Diligence supposes a fixed purpose and constancy of effort, as well as
enthusiastic devotion. When Isaac Rich trundled his wheelbarrow from
the oyster-boat in Boston to the market-place three miles off, having
invested all his worldly goods in what was before him, there was light
in his eye and warmth in his heart though the day had not dawned. He was
a poor young man from Cape Cod. He had made choice of his business for
life. I do not know how long he followed it behind the barrow. Years ago
he gave a million and three quarters of dollars to found a college in
the city that itself yielded this treasure to his diligence and thrift.
“The hand of the diligent maketh rich.” “Seest thou a man diligent in his
business? He shall stand before kings. He shall not stand before mean
men.” Let young men bind these divine proverbs upon their foreheads, and
write them where they can be seen, as rules of their business lives.

3. Another condition of success is force, or energy. This comes often by
heredity, transmitted from parent to child. In any case it is a precious
gift, a great talent, for the right use of which every one receiving it
must give account. From it, as a reserve power, one may draw at will
to push on any work in which he takes delight. Call it the magnetic or
electric power of the will, if you please. It may be like the same subtle
fluid in destructive flash, or like it in the crisp air of a winter’s
day, nerving one for almost tireless effort.

4. It may seem almost superfluous to add to the list of personal
qualities conditioning success in business the quality of competency. It
may be said to include all that have been already noticed, and all that
a business man needs. It is the state of being competent or adequate
for what one has to do to win success. It supposes that in theory and
practice he has acquired fitness for his calling. The theory he must get
by careful observation of everything connected with his business, by
conversation with others, older and, it may be, wiser and more gifted
than himself; by carefully reading what is current, and what is past,
bearing upon the work he has in hand, and by much thought of his own.
He may then be able to reach conclusions far in advance of any dreamed
of by the heedless. He studies fabrics, woods, metals, fruits, sugars,
teas, coffees, markets, finance, men. So he grows in mental power and the
consciousness of it. He commands an increasing influence among business
men, and learns how to expend the force that urges him on to larger and
better ventures in trade.

But he must have practice with theory; habits of doing as well as
thinking. This he can accomplish only by putting his own hand to the
work, as a child learns to write, or to master the key-board of a piano.

The men who take the lead of affairs, whatever they lack, are sure to
have a most minute and entire knowledge of their branch of business; such
a knowledge as can be got only by taking hold and doing every part of it.

Young men should see things with their own eyes, and touch and fashion
things with their own hands. With character, and reputation and diligence
and force and competency, in all ordinary circumstances they can make a
business for themselves. If they have little money and live within their
means they will find it growing on their hands fast enough for their
good. If they go largely on credit they will be in danger when a panic
comes. Let a young man keep safely within due limits, be content with
moderate gains, ask of the Lord “a prudent wife,” and take his place
among the true and strong men of the land and the world.