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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Come then, young men, and let me persuade you to a worthy view of life. God meets you as you read these words, and offers to be the guide of your human life. The good God did not send you into his creation to be afterwards an accursed thing in the outer darkness. This life of yours, with its endowments and capabilities, may become a sublime and influential life—a blessed ascendency, a tower of strength to men, regnant in all that is majestic, angelic, and godlike. Hear how Divine counsel speaks to you: “How long, ye simple ones, will ye love folly? Turn you at my reproof: behold, I will pour out my Spirit upon you; I will make known my words unto you.” Nor will life thus passed be too earnest to be happy. Yours will be the happiness—not of animal enjoyments merely, not purchased with stabbing your self-respect, not followed with the heart-sobs of those who love you, but of one who is bringing into use the higher and diviner faculties of your nature. Your intelligence will be fed by knowledge, your soul will be ennobled by purity, your tastes will be in harmony with sweet sounds and beauty, your conscience will be kept in peace, and your heart’s emotions will have play in ways that leave no bitterness, but ofttimes swell into rapture. Believe me, the only thing that can give meaning and glory to your life is, to resolve most resolutely that you will not be enslaved, will not be degraded, will not be plunged into the mire and foulness of sin, but will live according to a life-plan of real nobleness. Remember, no one can do this for you. Your life is in your own hands; and God has so placed you among creatures, that He will not do you saving good without your consent. You may be a poor waif on the winds of temptation, drifted to whatever abyss of destruction they hurry you; or you may be a son of God, victorious over sin, ranking with the earth’s great ones, and followed with blessings. And then, and then, when the final issue comes, and you lie down to die, instead of regrets, yours may be the solid satisfaction that your life, from its very morning, has been consecrated to the side of goodness; and then, instead of a place with the wicked and the scorners, you may go into a heaven for which you are prepared, and into a life of glorious felicity that is to come, and into which you have been initiated down here.

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

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

Brother, will you try this life?