THE 

Young Man 

SETTING OUT IN LIFE. 



I. LITE : HOW WILL YOU USE IT ? 

H. SKEPTICAL DOUBTS : HOW YOU MAY SOLVE THEM, 

in. POWER OF CHARACTER : HOW YOU MAY ASSERT IT. 

IV GRANrEUR OF DESTINY : HOW YOU MAY REACH IT. 



BY WILLIAM GUEST, P. G. S. 



PUBLISHED BY THE 
AMEBICAN TEACT SOCIETY, 

150 NASSAU-STREET, NEW YORK. 



.68 



fvOOMS OF JOUNG yVLBN's CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION^ 

No. 161 Fifth- Avenue, ) 

To THE SeCRETAKIES OF THE AMEEICAN TRACT SOCIETY '. 

The Executive Committee of the Young Men's 
Christian Associations uf the United States and the 
British Provinces, having learned that your Society 
is proposing to reprint Mr. Guest's book, entitled, 
" The Young Man Setting Out in Life," desire to say, 
after a careful examination, that they take great pleas- 
ure in commending it to the " Christian Associations " 
of this continent, and to all young men, as one calcu- 
iated to be very largely usefu , and as meriting a wide 
circulation. 

CEPHAS BEAINEED, 

Chairman. 



Army And Navy Clufc 

Of Washington D,C, 

Jan .14, 193 o 



TO 

GEORGE WILLIAMS, ESQ. 

TREASURER OF THE LONDON ASSOCIATION, 



AND 



To THE VARIOUS MEMBERS OF THE 

Young Men's Christian y^ssociA- 
tions in the United Kingdom and 
America : 

To you I beg to offer the four following 
addresses — they may be helpful in your ser- 
vice for young men. Thousands there are 
who watch your Associations with deep and 
grateful interest. By some persons, it may 
bo, your aims are misunderstood. I have 
never learned that you condemned other lit- 
erary and recreative associations ; but you 
have felt that there was room for one dis« 



4 DEDICATION. 

tinctively Christian. You do r.ot frown on 
joy and pastime ; you do not disparage 
literary education ; but you havo 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 preeminently 
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 communit}^. 

To the best and most distinguished men 
of this era it seems that the stability and 
progress of the great Christian nations de- 
pend upon the maintenance of Christianity 
in its integrity, and as honestly derived from 
the supernatural teaching of the New Testa- 
ment Scriptures. We have, however, come 



DEDICATION. 5 

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 Gocf, 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 lumin- 
ous 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 lifo 
and self-development ; intellectual rational- 
ism, that makes man his own savior, denies 
sin and atonement, moral weakness and Di- 



6 DEDICATION. 

vine 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 con- 
sciousness 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 associ- 
ations, 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? Tou 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 



DEDICATION. 7 

fixed upon them in secret." Every good 
man must, therefore, wish you encourage- 
ment 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 un- 
derstand you will afterwards pour benedic- 
tions 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 Chris- 
tian 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, 



8 DEDICATION. 

which attempts to portray some of the as- 
pects of modern life, and some of the alarm- 
ing and imperilling temptations with which 
modern habits and modes of opinion are sur- 
rounding young men. 

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

W. G. 

London : Canonbtjrs Pake. 



Life: 



HOW WILL YOU USE TT? 



h 



IFE 



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 none 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 dow T n, 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 en- 
thusiasm which bodes ill. Young men stand 
in our great cities amid juggling expedients, 
glittering pretences, specious deceits, unscru- 



12 LIFE : 

pulous 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 coun- 
try. 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 though tfulness. 
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 



HOW WILL YOU USE IT? 13 

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. Yv T hat significance is 
in the word ! Life, with its unknown treas* 
ures 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-aug- 
menting 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 mean- 
ing of this gift. You, among creatures, are 
obviously destined to rank with the noblest or 
the basest of beings ; the elevation with which 
you come into the universe is the measure oi 



U LIFE : 

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? Tou 
have come to an age when this question con- 
fronts you. You ignore your rationality by 
evading it. The two paths of honor and dis- 
honor are now before you : which do you 
intend to take? I put the inquiry in this 
form — "What will you do with your life ? — be- 
cause 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 them- 
selves, sad to say, they have not even belong- 
ed to themselves. On their forehead might 
have been once written, " We are open to be- 
come 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 



HOW WILL YOU USE IT ? 15 

inviting any. unskilled or wicked hand to be- 
come 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 cir- 
cles 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 superi- 
ority; calls "the governor" slow; orders his 
tailor to make garments in a "fast" fashion ; 
cultivates an elegant beard ; secures a mas- 
sive 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 ap- 
pearance by lighting a cigar, and with a hat 
a la mode, walks out, a ready prey for the 
painted woman, and an advertisement for 



1G LIFE : 

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 — 
(here 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. Repu- 
diating all domestic and common interests, 
lie becomes valueless to humanity. The most 
beautiful emotions of man's nature become 
frigid. His self-absorption grows into a con- 
ceit which relieves others from the duty of 



HOW WILL YOU USE IT ? 17 

considering hirn. 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 uu- 
mourned. 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 enga- 
ged ; 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 rec- 
reation 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 

How Begin Life. 2 



18 LIFE; 

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 con- 
science 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 hungiy, that their scent after 
the game may be keener and more impelling, 
they slip the leash of what they term their 



HOW WILL YOU USE IT? 19 

" 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 bill- 
iard-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 cIowtl 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 temp- 
ter was in a dishonored grave, and the other 
tvas rising to affluence. 

Tou young men who sneer at religion as 
weakness and call godliness hypocrisy, it is 
you who are the hypocrites. You have risen 



20 LIFE: 

many a morning after a night of sin, and 
have felt liow satiety and loathing were ma- 
king deep footprints in your nature. You 
have seen the shamelessness and liollowness 
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 indescri- 
bable. In ten years the tempter I have spo- 
ken 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 man- 
hood ; not living out half their days : a past 
all loss, a future all blackness. Oh, where 



HOW WILL YOU USE IT? 21 

are our tear's 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 dis- 
tant 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 tow- 
ards the fall and the rapids which lay below. 
Gorged with his foul meal, with drooping 
wing and dormant energies, he slept on the 
foetid mass, and amid the oozing putrefac- 
tion. 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 



22 LIFE : 

cries awoke the echoes; he made frantic 
efforts to throw off his horrid companion ; 
looked up to the blue heaven he had aban- 
doned. It was too late : hurried over the 
rapid, he was sucked into the boiling catar- 
act, and dashed to destruction on the rocks 
beneath. How does such an illustration find 
its analogy in human life ! " His own ini- 
quity," 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, 
Hien exacting, then domineering, then uncon- 
trollable. 

Dear young man, the pride of a mother, 
the hope of a father, with an intensity of 



HOW WILL YOU USE IT? 23 

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, rnay, 
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 consid- 
erations 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 resjoonsibilitics. Influence, 
like all things else, is imperishable. Nothing 
perishes. The leaves of autumn do not per- 
ish ; 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 per- 



24 LIFE : 

form, not a word you speak, can wholly per* 
isb. 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 bet- 
ter or worse, and carrying forward their con- 
sequences to the judgment. Sin is imperish- 
able. Sin, like the soul, has immortality 
stamped on it : when once done, it cannot be 
undone. Even a saved man's sins are imper- 
ishable in the consequences, David, the king 
of Israel, sinned ; alas, how pitilessly ! He 
repented, and poured out a psalm of contri- 
tion 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 



HOW WILL YOU USE IT ? 25 

should be expunged from his writings. Ah, 
he wished what was impossible. His errors 
led to all the horrors of the French Revolu- 
tion, and have shattered the peace of thou- 
sands since. A drunkard may obtain for- 
giveness ; 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 wdiere she soon lies down to 
die. What cares he? Perhaps in a beauti- 
ful home he has forgotten her and her child. 
His turn comes at length to die. If con- 



26 LIFE ; 

science puts in a reminder, he calls the deed 
an "indiscretion" of his youth, which signi- 
fies 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 opeu 
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 wretched- 
ness, 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 dis- 
charge. 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, 



HOW WILL i r OU USE IT? 27 

and in the sight of thine eyes : but know thcu, 
that for all these things God will bring thee into 
judgment. Therefore remove the cause of sor- 
row frow thy heart, and put away evil f mm 
thy flesh: 1 * 

"Would that my address to young men could 
be in a happier and more joyous tone. But 

* 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 fascina- 
tion, 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? 



28 LIFE: 

life has sucli 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 tho 
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 end- 
less life beyond the grave will take its char- 
acter 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 im- 
mortality. 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 kncws, too, 



HOW WILL YOU USE IT? 29 

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 exist- 
ence of which you are an heir, and which lies 
beyond the grave. 

The late Archbishop Wha£ely, in some an- 
notations 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 verj 
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 larvae. The parasitical flies have a long> 
sharp sting, which pierces the body of the cat- 
erpillar, 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 



30 LIFE: 

as well as those that have escaped. Bui 
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 fol- 
lowers ; and so are- the elements of hell in 
other men. 

Prodigious is the inconsistency of some 
modern reasoners. They believe in the im- 
mortality of the soul. They see that the 
man is the development of the boy, and that 
the acts of the youth leave their impiess on 
the whole after-life. They say law is inflexi- 



HOW WILL YOU USE IT? 31 

ble, and that miracles therefore are impossi- 
ble. 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 mo- 
ment of death law goes in a straight, unbend- 
ing line ; why then, in the name of all pre- 
tence 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, 



32 LIFE: 

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 jou, 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 con- 
cerning 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 ivay, 
and be filled with their own devices." 

Come then, young men, and let me per- 
suade you to a worthy view of life. God 
meets you as j^ou read these words, and of- 
fers 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 ascen- 
dency, a tower of strength to men, regnant in 
all that is majestic, angelic, and godlike. 



HOW WILL YOU USE IT? 33 

Hear liow Divine counsel speaks to you : 
"How long, ye simple ones, will ye love folly? 
Turn you at my reproof : behold, I icill pour 
out my Spirit upon you ; I will make hwwn 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 bring- 
ing into use the higher and diviner faculties 
of your nature. Your intelligence will be fed 
by knowiedge, your soul will be ennobled by 
purity, your tastes will be in harmony with 
sw r eet sounds and beauty, your conscience 
will be kept in peace, and your heart's emo- 
tions 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 bo enslaved, 
will not be degraded, will not be plunged into 
the mire and foulness of sin, but will live ac- 
cording to a life-plan of real nobleness. Re- 
member, no one can do this for you. Your 

How Begin Life. 3 



34 LIFE: 

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 tempta- 
tion, 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 consecra- 
ted 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, for- 
giveriess for the sins of the past. God offers 
you all the merits of Christ's atoning sacri- 
fice. Through that great sacrifice he will 
receive you, and remember your sins no more. 



HOW WILL YOU USE IT? 35 

In the blessed book, in every variety of form, 
in every glowing and rich expression, are yoit 
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 Sav- 
iour of your soul. Ask for his Spirit to help 
you : his ear will be swift to hearken. This 
love to him will make his j^oke 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 forco 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 angeld 
shall tell you they have been waiting to wel - 
come you. 

Brother, will you try this life ? 



Skeptical Doubts: 



HOW YOU MAY SOLVE THEM. 



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 con- 
stitutional. They are not able to give easy 
credence to any tidings. "With others, the 
very stupenclousness of religious subjects 
causes the mind to pause in doubtfulness ; 
the revelations of Christianity are so tran- 
scendent, that thought wavers before their 
very grandeur. There may be doubt, yet 
again, from those appalling miseries of hu- 
man life which it is the mission of Christian- 
ity to heal; and no less from the strangely 
unchristian lives of Christian men. All such 



40 SKEPTICAL DOUBTS: 

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 hon- 
est 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. h * 

Observe, a great character is not built up 
by doubting. There is weakness, not strength, 

* In Memoriam, p. 143. 



HOW YOU MAY SOLVE THEM. 41 

in doubts. Nor is it necessarily a mark of 
intelligence to doubt. Any scanty mind may 
doubt, just as a fool may bold a penny-piece 
to his eye, and say lie lias 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. Chris- 
tian 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, prevarica- 
cious, 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 anx- 
ious 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 ev« 



42 SKEPTICAL DOUBTS: 

ery where 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 Ko- 
ran than that this universal frame is without 
a mind." May you not exaggerate this diffi- 
culty? 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 na- 
ture, and they emerge in an endless variety 
of forms; it clothes the forests with a robe of 
verdure, paints the fields. with countless flow- 
ers, 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 pho- 
tograph every mental emotion and every 
change of moral feeling. No subtlety cap 



HOW YOU MAY SOLVE THEM. 43 

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 ob- 
ject, 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. Tou will mostly 
find one of two things — either that the creed 
of the atheist has been adopted by him with- 
out two hours' reflection on the matter, or is 
a.n 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 mjTiad proofs of design in 
the atmosphere, the soils, the foliage, and 
his own frame, and affirm that there was no 



44 SKEPTICAL DOUBTS: 

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 tho 
adaptation of the camel to its life in the des- 
ert. 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 over- 
hung 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 tho 
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 oi 



HOW YOU MAY SOLVE THEM. 45 

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 "fgol" who saj's 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 immeas- 
urable 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 un- 
fold 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 im- 
mortal spirit, possessed by every human being, 
lies at the basis of ail 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 



46 SKEPTICAL DOUBTS: 

been a universal consent among the wisest 
philosophers of all times and nations, that 
the soul remains after the body. " The eon- 
sent 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 uni- 
verse. 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 mat- 
ter may pass into new combinations, they 
never cease to have existence. Tou 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?'' 



HOW YOU MAY SOLVE THEM. 47 

Observe once more on this subject, there 
are manifold proofs that the soul has in this 
state only the dawn of its being. The ani- 
mals 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 fu- 
ture life? Our lives here are not the tones 
of perfect harmony, but rather like stringed 
instruments being attuned for celestial mel- 
ody. And, alas, what inequalities, what suf- 
ferings, what wrongs have some to endure 
here that require another state for vindica- 
tion and rectification also! If, therefore, 
you find one argument against the immor- 
tality of the soul, you will readily find a hun- 
dred for it. 

A further source of doubt is, a false impres* 
sion respecting holy scripture. You may have 
thought that the Bible, being called a revela- 
tion from God, would be like a book written 
in heaven, and altogether different from hu- 



48 SKEPTICAL DOUBTS: 

man works. But, in infinite wisdom and 
mercy, this lias not been God's mode of 
revelation. He lias 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 faith- 
fulness 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 Amnion, 
whose origin is thus narrated. It is painful 
to follow the history of Saul, but it is merci- 
ful that we have such a vivid picture of the 



HOW YOU MAY SOLVE THEM. 49 

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 bit- 
ter 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 suf- 
fering, and of moral weakness, what I want 
is, not so much angeiic 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 in- 
tense heart-cries after God. I mourn David's 
sin and sufferings, but I feel grateful that tho 
Scriptures have preserved to me his Psalms, 

How Begin Life. 4 



50 SKEPTICAL DOUBTS: 

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: 3 t ou 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. Admira- 
ble, 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 impres- 
sion 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 



HOW YOU MAY SOLVE THEM. 51 

after. Perhaps the narrative is improbable 
\o a mind intensely literal, unused to eastern 
fciodes of thought, and which cannot find the 
truth under those partially allegorical repre- 
sentations which most effectually teach the 
vast bulk of the human race. The same ob- 
jections 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. InfiJlels 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 tho 
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 Home ? 
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 en- 
forcement of the principle — which the Gre- 



52 SKEPTICAL DOUBTB: 

cian 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 understand- 
ing.* Nothing so loudly proclaims that such 

* Not very long since, a public lecturer was proceeding 
to Sheffield, and in a railway train astounded me by argu- 
ing 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 ex- 
posed, and bid them labor for meat which endured untc 
everlasting life. Suppose a son of this skeptic had taken 
whai professed to be a letter from his mother, and singled 
out a clause from its context to bring the letter into con- 
tempt before a meeting, what would that father hrve called 



HOW YOU MAY SOLVE THEM. 53 

infidelity is not a thing of "honest" doubt, 
but of a bad mind and of a bad heart. Diffi- 
culties there are in the Bible. I have stud- 
ied most of those difficulties, and confess with 
gratitude that they have one by one disap- 
peared. 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 rela- 
tion to a spiritual world, which has purified 
the lives and pacified the consciences of mill- 
ions, and which has made just and consider- 
ate their treatment of others. 

Miracles which bear witness to divine revela- 
tions are made an occasion for doubt by some. 
Let us examine this objection candidly. "Why 
are miracles not believed? " They contradict 

*uch a son? A scoundrel. God probably pities him as 
lie would not his son. But let young men take heed of 
reasoning which is not merely a reproach to candor, but 
to common intelligence. 



54 SKEPTICAL DOUBTS: 

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 thai 
the sea once covered the beds of sea-shells on 
ihe tops of the highest mountains. " The 
snemies 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-lav/, there is no suspension of the law 
of nature ; the supreme law is still in opera- 
tion. 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 gravita- 
tion 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, 



HOW YOU MAY SOLVE THEM. 55 

be swayed by writers who find it the easiest 
Jof all things to multiply objections when they 
are utterly indifferent about finding replies. 
Eemember that in the first ages miracles must 
base been worked, else Christianity, with the 
tiemenclous sacrifices it demanded, could not 
have gained a footing in the earth, much less 
have changed the religion of the Roman em- 
pire. 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 w r riters 
especially to whom this remark applies. The 
first is Dr. Colenso. He w r as believed to be 
a learned theological scholar. Never was an 
estimate more false ; never did a more pedan- 
tic theologian take pen in hand. What pre- 
tensions had such a man to be a guide, who 
more recently tried to prove that there w r ero 
no accredited prayers to Christ in the Bible, 
nor in the Prayer-book, nor in the Presby- 
terian Psalter ? Thirty-four instances of di- 
rect prayer to Christ were at once pointed 
out in the Psalter ; more than tw r elve prayers 



56 SKEPTICAL DOUBTS: 

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 
nen 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 re- 
plied : " Well, you see I have lived long 
enough to hear many prophecies of this na- 
ture ; but the extinguisher lias always been 
a wooden one, which the light has burnt 
through." My friend's figure has remark- 
ably come true. Dr. Colenso had a reputa- 
tion 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 
I tiled 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, 



HOW YOU MAY SOLVE THEM. 57 

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 conclu- 
sion ? Do not start when I tell you : The 
Frenchman professes to believe that thou- 
sands of the most bigoted Jews, and of en- 
lightened Greeks and Eomans, 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 
Lad fancied she had seen a young Galilean 
rabbi alive who was really dead ! Just con- 
ceive what would now be the effect on Europe 
of a new religion whose fundamental fact 
had such puerile support. Why was it dif- 
ferent on educated Romans? Do not say I 
am deceiving you when I tell you that M. 



58 SKEPTICAL DOUBTS: 

Renan professes to believe that the apostle 
Paul abandoned prejudice, station, privilege, 
prospects, and braved scorn, appalling suf- 
ferings, 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 scien- 
tific men in our times are infidels. Very con- 
fidently 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 spo- 
ken of as atheistic, when out of hundreds of 
scientific men there were not a dozen whose 
language could have justified such an impu- 



HOW YOU MAY SOLVE THEM. 59 

tation. Such distinguished leaders of science 
as Professor Owen, Professor Phillips of Ox- 
ford, and Sir Roderick Murchison, would 
indignantly repudiate the charge of seeking 
to undermine the faith of England in Chris- 
tianity ; and in this they would have the 
sympathy of an overwhelming majority of 
scientific men in the British Isles. Tour 
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 sci- 
entific discussion would be beside the object 
of this address ; but note these accordances 
between one science and the Bible : Scrip- 
ture affirms the late date of man upon the 
earth'; so does geology — Sir 0. 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 geol- 
ogy," 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 geol- 



60 SKEPTICAL DOUBTS: 

ogy 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. Tou 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."* Indeed, 
there is no utterance that looks adverse to 
Scripture which is not met by a decided di- 
vergence of opinion equally scientific. 

Turn from these questionings to the his- 
tory 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 

* See Quarterly Journal of Geological Society, No. 86, 
p. 88. See note, p. 129. 



HOW YOU MAY SOLVE THEM. 61 

scholarship. The evidence for their absolute 
truthfulness is immeasurably greater than 
for the authenticity of any secular book 
which the past has transmitted tu us. You 
believe that eight hundred years ago a con- 
queror 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 j'ears 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 hu- 
man frailty, but abhors human vice ; He is 
despised, but never fretted ; insulted, but 
never ruffled ; never is He charged with sin, 



62 SKEPTICAL DOUBTS: 

yet by a strange and precious sjanpathy 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 under- 
stand, 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 dis- 
ciples. This fact comes to us on the testi- 
mony of the heathen historian Tacitus ; and 
Gibbon admits it must be received, as unques- 
tionably genuine. 

This Jesus Christ we affirm to be the Son 



HOW YOU MAY SOLVE THEM. 63 

of man and the Son of God. He is the Re- 
vealer of God. He pierced to the core of 
human misery, while he wielded the resour- 
ces 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 conse- 
quences which you will eternally deplore. 1 
cannot utter words that deserve comparison 
with those of Christ himself : " I am come 
a light into the world, that whosoever believ- 
eth in me should not abide in darkness." 
14 He that rejecteth me hath one that juclgeth 
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 re- 
ceive 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 



64 SKEPTICAL DOUBTS: 

doubt whether it is well to sow corn in the au- 
tumn 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 re- 
fuse the testimony of w r iser 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 w T orld 
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 



HOW YOU MAY SOLVE THEM. 65 

course of action and only five against it, he 
would be reckoned a fool wlio 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 prog- 
ress of society, and become the poor and de- 
spised. Tour 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 

How Begin Life. § 



66 SKEPTICAL DOUBTS : * 

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. 5 * Such is 
(he 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, con- 
sults 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 can- 



HOW YOU MAY SOLVE THEM. 67 

not cheat him, respects his honor. He chooses 
friendships that are elevating. No profane 
scorner walks by his side ; no impure profli- 
gate soils the atmosphere of his home. He 
spends his evenings amid cheerful enjoy- 
ments, ennobling elevations, or useful ameli- 
orations. 

Contrast the other. He rises from a prayer- 
less 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 dis- 
content. 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 busi- 
ness. The whole clay he is confused and 
hindered by the remembrance of the last 
night's pollution, or the planning for the com- 
ing evening's pleasure. When the evening 
has come, he goes where he will degrade 



68 SKEPTICAL DOUBTS: 

young women in a way which would arouse 
his direst indignation should another do the 
same to his sister; or he enters scenes where 
lie would die with shame if his mother or sis- 
ter 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 pitia- 
ble 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 English- 
man. Before she would enter upon her du- 
ties, 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* 



HOW YOU MAY SOLVE THEM. 69 

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 au* 
thoresses 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 seren- 
ity 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 sin- 
cere cry the answer came. Her heart, intel- 
lect, and conscience, found rest in Christ; the 
Bible became to her an exhaustless fount of 
wisdom; in mathematical culture and in mu- 
sical 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 bo 
true," they reasoned, " the Lord will give his 



70 SKEPTICAL DUUBTS: 

Spirit to them that ask him. We will put 
this promise to the proof." The one — John 
Newton — became the most influential preach- 
er of the gospel in the British metropolis ; 
the other — William Wilberforce — became oim 
of the best, most useful, and most honored of 
statesmen. 

My brother, let this be the test of your 
sincerity. Will you earnestly and perseve- 
ringly ask God to fulfil this promise in you? 
I shall close this address w 7 ith twelve arti- 
cles, which may be termed the ckeed of the 

II [FIDEL. 

1. That Book is to him an imposture and 
pretended revelation, which furnishes the 
only explanation ever offered of human mis- 
ery, suffering, and death ; which responds to 
man's universal craving for immortality, and 
throw r s 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 tran- 
script in the history of all nations, and on 
behalf of w T hich myriads rise up to testify 
that it has been a ceaseless impulse to aspi- 



HOW YOU MAY SOLVE THEM. 71 

rations, a comfort in their trials, and lias 
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 le- 
gendary traditions of Greece and Eome; for 
instead of making their ancestors gods and 
heroes, they make them slaves, and tell a his- 
tory of Jacob and his sons which covers their 
progenitors with infamy ; and strange to say, 
these fabrications imposed upon later proph- 
ets, who were the sternest denouncers of false- 
hood, and are now imposing upon six mill- 
ions of Jews, w T ho, with a tenacity unparal- 
leled 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 



12 SKEPTICAL DOUBTS: 

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 or 
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 ele- 
vated, 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, thou- 
sands 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 beep, proud, and the religion 
of their ancestors, which had been enrichecj 
by the grandest historical associatioDS. 



HOW YOU MAY SOLVE THEM. 73 

7. He believes tliat 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, ex- 
posed them to the most diabolical cruelties, 
and held to their testimony in the face of tor- 
tures, banishment, and a shameful death. 

8. He believes that, although Christianity 
is a lying system of priestism or fanaticism, 
it nevertheless, according to irrefutable testi- 
mony, 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, penni- 
less 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 con- 
dition of man on the surface of the wide 
globe„ 

10. He believes that the Christian Sab- 
bath, or the weekly seventh-day rest, is an 



74 SKEPTICAL DOUBTS: 

institution indispensable to the present phys- 
ical condition of men and animals; that with- 
out it modern civilization would bring to rayr*- 
iads of men and beasts unbroken toil, dis- 
ease, and premature death ; but that this sov • 
enth-day rest is a purely human institution, 
haying come, he scarcely know T s how, from 
men who were foisting on the w^orld false and 
illiterate traditions under the name of divine 
revelations. 

11. He believes that the w T ritings of the 
Christian Scriptures, although an ill -con- 
structed 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 perseve- 
ring investigation — the very scholars, think- 
ers, and master-spirits of humanity, such as 
Newton, Bacon, Milton, Boyle, Locke, Pas- 
cal, Davy, Chalmers, and a host besides. 

12. He believes that those great nations of 
Europe wdiich are immensely in advance of 
all the nations of antiquity, and of all the 
heathen and Mohammedan nations of Asia at 



HOW YOU MAY SOLVE THEM. 75 

tliis time, and which are distinguished for 
their liberty, wealth, culture, arts, schools, 
asylums, charity, and beneficence, have be- 
come so while under the sway of a miserable 
By stem 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 weak- 
i^ess, 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 in- 
volved in THE CREDULITY OF INFIDELITY. 



Powei\ of Character: 



HOW YOU MAY ASSERT IT 



Power of Pharacter 

HOW YOU MAY ASSEET 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 cre- 
ated. The great waste of life is wasted or 
perverted power. What noble youths come 
out of schools and colleges; how few after- 
wards 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 



80 POWER OF CHARACTER: 

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-stu- 
dent once said to Paley : " You are a great 
fool to waste your best years in the dissipa- 
tions 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 Eng- 
lish literature that has a naore 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 wero 
first proclaimed by individual lips. Great 
thoughts, that now are the axioms of human- 
ity, proceeded from the centre of individual 
hearts. No warlike host delivered the chil- 
dren of Israel from the bondage of Egypt, 



HOW YOU MAY ASSERT IT. 81 

but one man — Moses. No senate of states- 
men raised Israel to a pitch of greatness that 
proclaimed a theocratic nation to the world, 
out one man — David. No school of divines 
gave to England the Bible in the mother 
tongue, bat one man — "Wyckliffe. No learned 
society discovered America, but one man- 
Columbus. No association of science reveal- 
ed the clue to interpret the laws of the uni- 
verse, but one man — Galileo. No parliament 
saved English liberties, but one man — Pym. 
No assembly of theologians wrote the book, 
which next to the Bible has had the most 
potent influence on the English language and 
on English hearts, but one man — John Bun- 
yan. No confederate nations rescued Scot- 
land 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. Doubt- 
loss 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 

How Begin Lie. Q 



82 POWER OF CHARACTER : 

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, 
14 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 be- 
gin 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 puro 
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 for- 
get what I owe to my mother." Let him say 
this, and the insulter would be shamed, if 
Rhame were not dead. He would respect the 
fielf-assertion of his fellow-clerk. Does tho 
new-comer say this ? No ; his ears turn red ; 
his face is suffused with a blush; and in a 



HOW YOU MAY ASSERT IT. 83 

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 sorrow- 
fully 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 oi 
pleasure, till, amid the dark storm of ship- 
wrecked character, blasted reputation, wrung 
hearts at home, worn-out health, and misera- 
ble 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 suro 
that it would be better for him, for this life 
and for the next, 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 per- 



84 POWER OF CHARACTER : 

suaded by the wise? Has lie 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 
Uis conviction before the "mocking taunt of 
some empty -brained street lounger; has low- 
ered 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 soci- 
ety 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 indi- 
viduality 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 



HOW YOU MAY ASSERT IT. 80 

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 
m meaning. There is many a filthy blasphe- 
mer who is profane, because he never resolved 
that the foul oath should not soil his lips, 
There is many a defiled, polluted, and dis- 
eased 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, vile- 
ness, 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 want- 
ed 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 compan- 
ionable and sympathetic, therefore miscreants 
suck them by temptation. 



SO POWER OF CHARACTER : 

It would be grateful to our feelings if this 
compromise of individual character were con- 
fined 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 Eng- 
land'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 respon- 
sibility from the one to the many is the secret 
alike of national and of individual ineffective- 
ness. 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 hin- 
dered 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 



HOW YOU MAY ASSEET IT. 87 

is not on the side of young men. They do 
not so much make manifest their subservien- 
cy, 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 omni- 
bus 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 ap- 
pointments. So he burdens himself, or spec- 
ulates, 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 neighbor- 
hood, or drags out a vexed and discontented 
life, because he has forgotten the honor 
which he midlife have commanded at the out- 
get, 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 ox 



88 POWER OF CHARACTER : 

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 
-fined and timid lady, enlarges his stables, 
!>uys 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 ludi- 
crous, wure 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 vitupera- 
\ i ve energy of which their nature is capable, 
Hie next month, forsooth, they have adopted 
that precise opinion, and eagerly rush to share 
some leaf of the laurel which they hope will 



HOW YOU MAY ASSERT IT. 89 

fall upon tliem through the tergiversation of 
their party. 

Tou 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 neighbor- 
hood. No workman but honored him; no 
cottager but felt the sweetness of his sympa- 
thy. The son of this great and good man is 
thrown among Ritualists. This is the reli- 
gious 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 " aesthetic taste." Deplor- 
ably ignorant of the past struggles of Eng- 
lish history, he is gratified with the crowded 
churches in which he can witness this picto- 
rial religion of waving censers, purple-robed 
priests, and picturesque altar arrangements 
He falls into the cant of saying that Protes- 
tantism is "unsymbolical." The white-robed 
choristers and lighted candles respond to 



90 POWER OF CHARACTER : 

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 teach- 
ers. 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 piti- 
able, but it is also sad, to think what ineffec- 
tiveness of life comes to a young man who, 
instead of being the dupe of weaklings, might 
have allied himself with the grandest of Eng- 
lishmen, and left behind him records of abi- 
ding 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 deplora- 
ble lack of force. Instead of quickness, brisk- 



HOW YOU MAY ASSERT IT. 91 

^ess, 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 unc- 
tuous 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. Ton will find a 
class of religious men not at all sentimental, 
but who will sneer at what they term reli- 
gious earnestness. A young man's worst 
enemies are often cold, formal, routine Chris- 
tians — Christians who think that to stand 
well with the world, to get into "good soci- 
ety," to be always very respectable, and to 
have as little cross-bearing as possible, is the 
golden mean of religious life. Toung men, in 



92 POWER OF CHARACTER: 

the name of all that is true and noble, set 
yourselves against this style of religious pro- 
fession. The worst weakness in the world is 
to fear to clo a right thing because others 
will criticise it. 

There were many Christian men in "Wit- 
temberg 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 ig- 
norance. The crowds of the common people 
who come into the city to market will read 
these words. Tours is not discretion, but 
cowardice." He did the deed ; and as tho 
result of that act, Europe received the Prot- 
estant Reformation, and the night of the mid' 
die ages was ended. 



HOW YOU MAY ASSERT IT. 93 

On one occasion, Neliemiali was urged by 
his friends to desert the post of duty, to con- 
ceal 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 W^est In- 
dian emancipation, Sir Thomas Fow r ell Bux- 
ton w r as about to divide the House of Com- 
mons ; his friends appealed to him not to 
divide. They came one by one, sat down by 
his side, urged and implored him not to di- 
vide ; 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 w r as 
next introduced before the House as a Cabi- 
net measure. 



C4 POWER OF CHARACTER: 

There went from Manchester to the Brit- 
ish 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 hail- 
ed 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 
fiom other men. They may be weak, or 
prejudiced, or trimmers, or cowards. Why 
should you lose your individuality for them ? 



HOW YOU MAY ASSERT IT. 95 

" 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 
W r rong 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 
AVhat 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 quit* 



06 POWER OF CHARACTER: 

sure tliat you cannot pass into manhood 
without heavenly visitations. Do not, I im- 
plore, neglect these visitations. Do not quiefc 
your conscience by a subterfuge. Do not 
hold the performance of a clear duty in sus- 
pense. 

Behold a scene of which history tells us. 
There are two men standing face to face in a 
Eoman 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 sur- 
round 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 mo- 
ment when heaven flashed conviction upon 
his path. He reasons with resistless logic 
and eloquence in proof of the truth of Chris- 
tianity. 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 as- 



HOW YOU MAY ASSERT IT. 97 

sembly breaks up. The king is alone in his 
chamber, and muses : '• I become a Chris- 
tian — 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 for- 
bid 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 pur- 
suit of ambition and vice ; he gradually lost 
influence and power; his days became troub- 
led 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 hu- 
man salvation, than any other sinful mortal 
in all ages of the world. What was the se- 
cret of this majesty of influence? He told it 
in that court. When heaven had flashed COn- 
How Begin Life. 7 



98 POWER OF CHARACTER: 

viction upon his path, lie did not allow pleas- 
ure nor prejudice nor interest nor public opin- 
ion to sway him. These are his words : " 7 
ivas 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 accus- 
tomed to insist upon decision, decision, decis- 
ion, 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 excite- 
ments appropriate to your age. Joy and 
cheerfulness are your strength and heritage. 
Monkish austerity and sanctimoniousness are 
rarely virtues. But our modern civilization 
lias multiplied, under the name of pleasure, 
the facilities of vice. The perils that assail 
young men in great cities are so many, so 



HOW YOU MAY ASSERT IT. 99 

seductive, and so ruinous to body and soul, 
as to make an observer tremble. If, then, 
you would be obedient to the heavenly leach? 
ing, 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 com- 
mon room, or a fire in their chamber. They 
are open, therefore, to every allurement that 
promises pleasure. Places of business, more- 
over, are huge establishments where the loose 
moralist can cover vice by self-deceivable- 
ness, and where the subtle infidel, the scoffer, 
and the licentious mingle together. Eeiigion 
is ridiculed, and the clergy spoken of with 
a sneer. Filthy books are sold and circu«^ 
la ted — books of infamy, which minister to 
the vilest tastes, which taint and befoul the 
imagination with unclean images, and which 



100 POWER OF CHARACTER: 

a man can no more look at without defile- 
ment 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 youug men entered one music 
hall in London. Were these rooms harm- 
less, he would be an enemy to human happi- 
ness who objected to them. If they are de- 
moralizing 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 



HOW YOU MAY ASSERT IT. 101 

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. IE 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 Lever- 
rier could compute. One grain of sand, that 
did not fall into its place, would disturb, or 



102 POWER OF CHARACTER: 

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 some- 
thing by you. Yours may not be the high- 
est, 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-blos- 
som, 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 forma- 
tive 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 fulfil- 
ling 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, 



HOW YOU MAY ASSERT IT. 103 

each keeping his appointed place, the silent 
preacher of obedience to thy will. I see the 
bird that balances its pinions on the air, tes- 
tifying 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 min- 
istering 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 ear- 
nestly, Y> 7 hat is the meaning of my life, Father 
of spirits? I share thy counsels ; reveal thy 
thought respecting me." Deeply am I con- 
vinced, my brother, that if with some, such 
prayer j^ou enter upon this period of your 
life, your existence will prove no meaningless 
thing; it will be instinct with influence, and 
will have an end to which you will come with 
unutterable rapture, 



104 POWER OF CHARACTER: 

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 y ou should disparage 
associations. The most useless men are those 
who will never combine. Exaggerated indi- 
viduality 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 Monta- 
lembert 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 enor- 
mous amphitheatre, whose tiers rising above 
tiers. remain to this day, tens of thousands of 
spectators looked down on the bloody spec- 
tacle, and thousands of victims were slaugh- 
tered. A holy man in the East heard of the 
deeds of blood. The fire of a righteous in- 
dignation seized him. He traveller], to Eome; 



HOW YOU MAY ASSERT IT. 105 

arrived there as the imperial games were be- 
ing 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 curios- 
ity. He threw himself between the gladia- 
tors engaged in the sanguinary combat. In 
the name of the God of heaven he com- 
manded 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 testi- 
mony. The nobleness of the sacrifice showed 
the horror of the abuse. The emperor Hono- 
rius 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 



10(1 POWER OF CHARACTER: 

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 saya 
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 



HOW YOU MAY ASSERT IT. 107 

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 pur- 
pose 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, clisen- 



108 POWER OF CHARACTER. 

thralled of flesh, thou shalt rise to the un- 
obstructed sphere where hinderance never 
comes, and where thou shalt begin an illim- 
itable work. There, with thy life grafted 
upon the infinite, it w T ill be fruitful as no 
earthly life can be- 



Grandeur of Pestinv: 



HOW YOU MAY REACH IT. 



Grandeur of Destiny: 
how you may keach it. 



The belief in the doctrine of growth is of 
infinite moment to a young man. The differ- 
ence 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 yon 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 possibil- 
ity of the highest moral and spiritual prog- 
ress, and he not only has hold of a truth that 
is saving, but if faithful, he will reach a maj- 
esty 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. 



112 GRANDEUR OF DESTINY: 

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 feel- 
ers, 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 clew 
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 sum- 
mer ; 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 



HOW YOU MAY BEACH IT. 113 

banner of. strange device," so lie may ever 
see "not yet" shining like a star on the brow 
of the future. The youth, the trusting Chris- 
tian, the devoted worker, the mature saint 
fire but the lowest steps of his ever-ascend- 
lug 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 dil- 
igence by the side of the conductor. Hovr 
invigorating was the fresh mountain-air of 
the morning, like the first love of a young 
heart to Christ. But as the road toiled up- 
ward, 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 uainvadecl 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 

Ha*' Begin Life. $ 



114 GRANDEUR OF DESTINY: 

of waters. There behind was the river, gli- 
ding 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 raptu- 
rous hours we went higher; and as we as- 
cended, fresher grew the air, more beautiful 
the leaping w r aterfalls, more sublime the pass 
through galleries of rocky labyrinths, more 
thrilling the transition from gloomy denies 
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 ever- 
lasting hills. 

In a loftier sense than this, higher and ever 
higher may be a Christian young man's prog- 
ress. Follow him. He is active and devoted 
in all that blesses man ; he rises in harmony 
of character and effectiveness of influence ; 
lie comes to have a name in the community 
of men, and is a man of mark among his fel- 
lows ; to those coming on the stage of life ho 
becomes the pattern-man ; and those w r ho 
once sneered at his decision and aspirations 



HOW YOU MAY REACH IT. 115 

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 s 
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 wel- 
comed 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 com- 
panion 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 



116 GRANDEUR OF DESTINY: 

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 ex- 
panded 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 ex- 
cept it be given him from heaven." ft Ev- 
ery good gift and every perfect gift is from 
above." 

1 do not mean to affirm that you are to be 
passive. Go again to nature to learn her par- 
able. The plant grows by receiving ; but it is 
not, like rocks and stones, dull and inert; it 



HOW YOU MAY REACH IT. 117 

avails itself of its advantages for growth. It 
cooperates 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 3 T oung man, study your nature. In 
the truly-developed man there are three pow- 
ers — body, soul, spirit. This three-fold dis- 
tinction which is made in the Bible, remark- 
able to say, is also that of the latest and ma- 
turest 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 alJ 
your endowments. There, unthought of, it 
may be, is that divine faculty which sepa< 



118 GRANDEUR OF DESTINY: 

rates you from the brutes and allies you to 
the seraphim. There, smouldering in dark- 
ness or selfishness, is a spirit which nothing 
earthly can satisfy; which sends forth aspi- 
rations 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 be- 
come the dominant principle, and bring all 
evil into subjection to itself, and become ele- 
vated in wisdom and ascendency, till, shaking 
off every encumbrance of corruption, its pow- 
ers 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 
Goclward 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 



HOW YOU MAY REACH IT. 119 

trust, and appropriate hini in all Lis person- 
ality 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 dia- 
monds, 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 w^as opened. Its power of receiv- 
ing had freedom. It now allowed the minu- 
test 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 im- 
plore you, to the cry of your own immortal 
spirit. Open your nature, that you may re- 
ceive the quickening life of the Almighty. 
You hear at this time much about religious 
cant and hypocrisy. It seems as if even the 



120 GRANDEUR OF" DESTINY: 

better class of novelists of our period could 
never expound their own moral principles 
without a contemptuous sneer at the reli- 
gious phraseology or life of their fellow- 
Ohristians. But let me tell you, the cant 
which is the most irrational, and the hypoc- 
risy 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 quiv- 
ering beech-leaves should be ashamed of the 
sunbeams that dance on their smooth sur- 
face ; 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 receiv- 
iiig illumination and impulse, wisdom and ele- 
vation, from the Father of your spirit, is the 
most pitiable misjudgment of which any crea- 
ture can be capable. Talk of religious cant— 



HOW YOU MAY REACH IT. 121 

there is no cant tliat is so hateful, because 
there is no cant that is so unreflecting and 
senseless, as that which sneers at man hav- 
ing fellowship with his Maker. It is God, 
my brother, who gives to every star its bright- 
ness, 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 move- 
ments of God, it will glow, develop, acquire 
jiscendence; 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 



122 GRANDEUR OF DESTINY: 

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 institu- 
tions ; 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 uncon- 
genial 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, 



HOW YOU MAY REACH IT. 123 

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, dead- 
ens religious capacitj 7 , extinguishes holy sus- 
ceptibility, darkens the understanding to the 
things of Gocl, 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 



124 GRANDEUR OF DESTINY: 

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 loivest 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 intel- 
lectual. "Wisely they culture intellect, but 
they neglect the heart. They acquire infor- 
mation, 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 polit- 
ical 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— 



HOW YOU MAY REACH IT. 125 

the development of the spirit in man. These 
of the highest class are lighted tip 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 en- 
larged with beneficence ; they have aptitude 
for spiritual enjoyments, and receive con- 
stantly new accessions of joy and power, 
whereby they become fitted for those bliss- 
ful 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 



126 GRANDEUR OF DESTINY: 

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 w r hich nature has withheld; but, if 
true, it will vastly improve whatever intellect 
a man has. It will not supply high reason- 
ing powers if they were not there before ; but 
it will save reason from that blindness of con- 
ceit and prejudice whereby so many are fatal- 
ly 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- 
ard Cobden is represented as having declared 
that he never felt confidence in a man who 
was not possessed by religion; he w r as not at 
all sure what action he would take. Myriads 



HOW YOU MAY REACH IT. 127 

of facts confirm the observation of the states- 
man. 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 Chris- 
tian takes the higher place; of two merchants 
equally practical and far-seeing, the Christian 
reaches the surest success. There were Ara- 
bian 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 power- 
fully affected humanity. There were many 
Saxon kings who loved their country like 
Alfred ; but none so great. There were in 
Lis times many who loved liberty like Milton; 
but none w T hose writings are more read in 
these. There 'have been many investigators 
of nature like Sir Isaac Newton; but none so 



128 GRANDEUR OF DESTINY: 

distinguished. There have been many sol- 
diers 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 Wil- 
berforce. 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 great- 
ness. "A man's religion," says Dr. Hunting* 
don very finely, "fertilizes the whole field of 
his being. It makes his business safer, his 
scholarship wiser, his manhood manlier, his 



HOW YOU MAY REACH IT. 129 

joy healthier, his strength stronger. It is the 
crown of his enterprise and the charni of his 
affections, the humility of his learning, and 
the glory of his life. And because it has 
Bight of things not seen and eternal, it is the 
splendor, the transfiguration, and the sanc- 
tity of things seen and temporal." 

Observe, however, it is not greatness to 
which I would urge you. There is the attrac- 
tiveness 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, ame- 
nity 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, 
Ff 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 

How Begin Life. Q 



130 GRANDEUR OF DESTINY: 

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 
Kev. Jonathan Glycle of Bradford — in whom 
the combination of excellencies I have sketch- 
ed was exemplified. His had been for many 
years the reach after this moral and spiritual 
perfection ; and he attained, as mairy admi- 
ringly witnessed, his own ideal of gentleness 
and dignity, consideration for others and 
abnegation of self, beautiful humility and 
scholarly attainment, saintly purity and un- 
failing 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, ap- 
proached the head of his bed to raise the 
pillows. Seeing their mistake, he fell back 



HOW YOU MAY KEACH IT. 131 

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 bless* 
edness 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 ex- 
cuse for you in attempting to find happiness 
without God; but you stand with the opeu 
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. Bead 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 lite- 
rature, and still the wisest men busied them- 
selves to find the lost treasure of human hap* 



132 GRANDEUR OF DESTINY: 

piness, 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. 
Ycfu have been told of the gay Lord Chester- 
field recojding at the close of an enviable life 
of fashion and pleasure, " I am now wise 
enough to feel and attest the force of Solo- 
mon's reflections, that all is vanity and vexa- 
tion 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 complain- 
ing of headache, and the night in drinking 



HOW YOU MAY REACH IT. 133 

the wine which gives the headache." In ad- 
vanced age the celebrated skeptic said of 
himself, " They have called me a child of for- 
tune, 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 con- 
stant 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 want- 
ing. After his death this authentic memorial 
was found in his cabinet : " I have now reign- 
ed above fifty years in victory or peace ; be - 
loved by my subjects, dreaded by my ene- 
mies, and respected by my allies. Riches, 
honors, power, and pleasure have waited on 



134 GRANDEUR OF DESTINY: 

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 
bave fallen to my lot : they amount to four* 
teen ! O man, place not thy confidence in 
this present world." 

In mentioning these things, I have no de- 
sire to detract from the real happiness there 
is in human life. There are a thousand sour- 
ces 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 op- 
portunities were greater than your own tell 
you that at " the end it biteth like a serpent 
and stingeth like an adder," is it not consum- 
mate folly for you to shut your ears to the 



HOW YOU MAY REACH IT. 135 

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 advan- 
tages. He was surrounded by the licentious- 
ness 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 lie 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 
donee requiescat in Te." 

2. Take Jieed of the first wrong step. In the 
life of the late Mr. Baines, Member of Par- 
liament for Leeds, it is recorded that one day 
|ie was watching an apprentice, whose habits 



136 GRANDEUR OF DESTINY: 

were doubtful, fold a newspaper. At the first 
fold there was a wrinkle, and at every suc- 
ceeding 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 w r as 
content with one sin ?" said a heathen moral- 
ist. 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 contempt- 
ible and hopeless of men, a confirmed liar. 
A great preacher, the late Dr. Winter Hamil- 
ton, 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 $> music and dancing saloon 
may so pollute the imagination as to break 



HOW YOU MAY REACH IT. 131 

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 suffer- 
ing 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 conces- 
sion made to it so much as sin. Among the 
most striking things in our language is a sen- 
tence of Jeremy Taylor on the progress of 
sin : " Sin startles a man — that is, the first 
step ; then it becomes pleasing ; then it be- 
comes 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 heav- 
enly 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 ; 



1J8 GRANDEUR OF DESTINY: 

the wrong waits to claim us and hold domin- 
ion over us, and our good God, who sees the 
end, says, " Go not in the w r ay 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 
w T eaker. No one, however, can win the vic- 
tory for you. The test to prove whether you 
will be ignoble or noble, is for you to grapple 
with. With the first temptation, then, con- 
tend ; 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 aVjominable than 
this one as to the sowing of wild oats. Look 



HOW YOU MAY BEACH IT. 139 

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 mid- 
dle-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 
Bowing 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." 



140 GRANDEUR OF DESTINY: 

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 hun- 
dreds 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 with- 
out forewarning them of the rocks ahead of 
them. While these sheets were passing 
through the press, I had a most painful illus- 
tration 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 yearn- 
ing love of pure and beautiful sisters. Be- 
cause of his intelligence and probity, he was 
placed in a situation of trust, and went on 
well while the thought of home and its sanc- 
tities was with him. The tempter tried her 
arts, and caught him in her wiles. The ex- 
penses of the dancing-room and the habits it 
led to were beyond his limit of wealth. He 



HOW YOU MAY REACH IT. 141 

took from intrusted money; the embezzle- 
ment 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 ref- 
erence. At twenty-one he has brought a 
dark shadow over his life-dawn. Deep as is 
the darkness, it mav be God's onlv means of 
answering his mother's prayers. Alas, for 
five years of his imprisonment has that moth- 
er's heart to be riven ! 

When I w r as a minister in Leeds, a fine 
youth came to that town. He was a native 
of a far-off land. He came to acquire me- 
chanical knowledge more perfectly prior to 
becoming head of a great house. "Wealth 
and possessions were before him. An at- 
tached family circle delighted in him. He 
was amiable, fascinating, and naturally gen- 
erous. A group of wild young men deter- 
mined 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 



142 GRANDEUR OF DESTINY: 

brotliel. His kind employer remonstrated 
with liim 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. Hm 
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 instru- 
mentalities for noble development. They 
have their incitements to the most pleasura- 
ble excitation. They bring a collision of 
mind largely beneficial. They open chan- 
nels for benevolence and greatness as no 



HOW YOU MAY REACH IT. 143 

other places do. But my advice is, let no 
man come to a great city without courage. 
If lie 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 say- 
ing, "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 prov- 
erb we need to repeat to ourselves : " Seest 
thou a man wise in his own conceit, there is 



144 GRANDEUR OF DESTINY: 

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 
fomvard. That right course is before you. 
No past guilt of j^ours 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 Chris- 
tianity 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 start- 



HOW YOU MAY REACH IT. 145 

ing. 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. 

1 ' 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 

How Begin Life. 10 



L4G GRANDEUB OF DESTINY: 

Washington ; " if that is the only reason for 
retaining it, then it must perish." "Burn 
the bridge !" was his instant ortier ; and it 
was laid in ashes. 

5. Cultivate helps to the spiritual life. That 
]ife 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 four- 
teen, and who are worldly at twenty. No 
doubt there were fine religious susceptibili- 
ties 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 ap- 
parent religious life should have died. It is 
very much to be deplored, that with the facil- 
ities 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 — cooperation with God. When a 
man has saplings in his orchard which bear 



HOW YOU MAY REACH IT. 147 

only wild fruit, like a good orcliardist 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 sciona 
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 mon- 
grel 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 un- 
profitable 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 hus- 
bandman. When a young man has much 
given to him — religious training, divine move- 
ments on his soul, glimpses of the beauty and 
blessedness of a religious life — if then thersr 
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, joy- 



148 GRANDEUR OF DESTINY: 

less. If the little life is in thy heart, my 
brother, let me implore thee to seek its 
growth by prayer, by public and social wor- 
ship, by seeking acquaintance with the mind 
• of the Spirit in holy Scripture. The Tinv.s 
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 Scrip- 
tures 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 3 T ou 
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. Asso- 
ciate yourself .with the aspiring. Seek the 
sympathy and helpfulness of a Christian 
church. You will not do this because you 
are strong, but because 3*011 feel weak. You 
will go into a church not because you arc 
wise and holy, but because you need pray- 



HOW YOU MAY BEACH IT. 149 

ers, 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 grand- 
est w T orks which have gone to save and bless 
the world have been done by Christian de- 
nominations; 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 dig- 
nified 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 loy- 
alty through Christ unto God. He is calling 
you through these words to glory and vir- 
tue. He strives with you to win your love. 
His garments have been dyed in blood for 
your salvation. He bows himself to you and 



150 GRANDEUR OF DESTINY: 

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 
iu 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. Cease- 
lessly, 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 human- 
ity, and who now know the meaning and 
grandeur of a destiny that called them to 
glory an€l 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 ? 



HOW YOU MAY BEACH IT. 151 

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 inexpres- 
sible benignity, patience, and sympathy, has 
Christ helped me ! And now, should I be 
called to no other service, in the closing mo- 
ments 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. 



