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When we are young we may be susceptible to the new, only because it is new to us. We are ready to welcome in book or speech anything which charms us with a novelty we readily mistake for originality. After we have crossed a line it may be well that most of us should become a bit obstinate, a little stiff in our beliefs, lest we be blown about by every wind of doctrine. At the same time, there is always the danger of becoming so rigid in our opinions and faith as to permit no horizon of hope. There are multitudes, in our churches and outside them, who, from want of the hope that saves, are dying from the top downwards.

And among them is an increasing proportion of young men. I hear them boast that they have no ideals, no hopes or aspirations that are above the earth earthy. For once, at any rate, they have a conviction, and it is, that man lives by bread alone, that his life is in the abundance of the things which he possesses. They are too "knowing" to be caught prisoners by ideas, too much "men of the world" to concern themselves about the "Utopias of religion." And they call it strength. Strength! It reminds one of the bitter remark of an historian on the march of the Roman legions: "They make a solitude, and call it peace." Strength! There are those in perdition at this moment who could tell them that what they call strength is the stupidity which adds to sin the increment of a huge blunder.

The young man who is strong is he who has the moral genius of his years. He does not deny that man lives by bread, but he does deny that man lives by bread alone. He has faith in the upward trend of the world; and he has the hope which can give to faith its adequate translation. He does not believe that there are two Almighties in the world and that the devil is the greater; that sin shall breed sin for ever. He does not believe that the many must drudge to the limit of endurance and starve their higher nature as long as the world lasts, that the few may taste the sweets of culture and opulence. He does not believe that brute force shall for ever trample splendid intelligence underfoot, or that we must always stand on the margin of the dark river of wrong, in the unfathomed depths of which lie mysteries of terror--the despair of man, the sorrow of God. He has hope, that mighty dynamic--God's pledge to the young and unspoiled soul of a coming day when all that is false and unbelieving and wicked shall be cast into the consuming fire of divine holiness. He has faith in the great day of the Lord; and with the splendid optimism, the hope peculiar to his years, he cries: "I can, and I will, hasten the coming of my Lord." This is one great element of a young man's strength--hope in goodness, which goes so far to sustain the toil that can realize it. "I have written unto you, young men, because ye are strong."

Another factor in this strength is--Freedom. I hardly like the word, but I want to express by it immunity from certain responsibilities. Young men, up to a given period, are, as never again, free to sacrifice for what look like the forlorn hopes and apparently lost causes of humanity. "My six reasons for taking no risks," said a man in the American Civil War, "are a wife and five children." The reasons which in one man may resolve themselves into prudence, in the case of another man, differently circumstanced, may be nothing better than cowardice. Some years ago four men stood on the cage at the mouth of the shaft that penetrated to the workings of a Yorkshire coal-mine. There had been an explosion, and over forty men were imprisoned in what seemed likely to be their grave. The brave fellows on the cage knew they were taking their lives in their hands, but they stood calmly waiting the signal which should lower them into a possible death. While some detail of the machinery was being adjusted, a fine stalwart young man, some three-and-twenty years of age, forced his way through the crowd, and, seizing one of the rescue-party, literally flung him out of the cage to the pit-bank, and before the people could recover from their astonishment the men were being lowered through the pathway of the deep. Then they realized the meaning of the action. "He did it," said the man who had been so summarily handled, and his voice shook with emotion, "because I have a wife and bairns." The younger man was free from responsibility; he could better afford the risk.

There is a very real sense in which the same consideration tells in the warfare against sin and wrong. Some of us have less to risk in taking up the challenge which the powers of death and hell throw down to every true man. I write unto you, young men, because from your relationship to circumstances you are more free to accept risks.

We often hear men lament, and it may be sincerely, that they cannot afford to face the practical logic of their social, political, and religious beliefs. They shrink from the consequences of the good fight of faith. "Had I only myself to consider," says one, "how gladly would I sacrifice myself to attack this wrong or that iniquity." We need offer no opinion about the moral quality of such a position; enough to say that it is idle to ignore, or even to underrate, the force of it.

There are circumstances which are too strong for most men after they have put themselves in a given relation to circumstances.

Let me say a word here about circumstances, which will seem to contradict some things you will find in this book, if you have interest enough in it to read it through. A Glasgow minister some time ago made a stand against a considerable minority in his church over some matter that, as he said, involved a principle for which he should fight. It cost him many of his more wealthy members and adherents. "Not many of us," I said to him after, "have your courage to take so serious a risk." "Nor should I have had it," he answered, "had I not means that make me independent of my salary." It was a candid admission, and it reaches a long way. The strength of this man was in his position quite as much as in himself; and this is probably true of the great average of us. Circumstances may mean possibilities, more often than possibilities mean, or create, circumstances. What we can do is not only determined by what we bring into the world, but by what we find when we get here. Give, then, whatever courage is native to you its full purchase, by whatever favour you have in circumstances. It is here the young man has a great advantage; he is at an age when he can afford risks; let him use it before his years are mortgaged by other demands.

In public life he can base his efforts on the fact that there are tremendous evils that need resistance, that there are sacred causes which need assistance. He can afford, as never again, to close with the truth that there is a corporate life, a public virtue, a humanity of the body politic, with laws, responsibilities, and duties. In social life he can refuse to bow to an arbitrary and often empty fashion, or to immolate himself on the altar of mammon. He can be a living protest against the tyranny and lust of money, which are eating away the heart and destroying the soul of Christendom. He can stand for the sane and rational ideas and habits of life, without which society but personifies the unscrupulous and vulgar parvenu. And in religion he can accept the teaching and obey the commands of Christ without any overwhelming temptation to escape them behind some exegetical device or the plea of expediency. He can devote the rose bloom of his years to great principles, before he has had time to catch the infection of a commonplace belief in God. He can be a soldier of the Cross, and have himself placed in the forefront of the battle. He can go down into the pit to rescue the perishing, and take daring, awful risks for the Captain of his salvation and the race of which he forms a part. I have written unto you, young men, because you can afford to be strong.

A third, and for my present purpose a closing consideration in a young man's strength is--Audacity. I might call it courage, but it is that plus something else. It is courage carried to a point of daring that amounts to what I have called it, audacity, or, as the world would call it, foolhardiness. It is the merciful blindness which will not see difficulties; it is the glorious recklessness which will not be stopped by them. It is neither blindness nor recklessness; it is the baptism with which a young man must be baptized whose life is penalized for the Cross.

When a certain woman came into the presence of Jesus, and anointed Him with an ointment very precious, He answered the selfish criticism of some of the disciples with the unqualified remark that "long as His Gospel should be preached, this that she had done would be told for a memorial of her." To these disciples it is probable that the answer sounded like a benediction on waste. Jesus saw in the deed an abandon on the side of good, which on the side of evil makes evil so popular and, as it seems at times, almost universal. No one but a woman, unless it were a young man of true fibre, would have broken the vessel. Your middle-aged or old man would have cautiously taken out the stopper, that the costly unguent might have been expended economically, even on the Saviour. But this woman, in her uncalculating devotion, broke the vessel, that all its contents might issue forth in one consecrated gift of love. And it was what this broken vase symbolized that explains, or does something to explain, the unmeasured recognition of the action.

This is the moral temper of the young man whom St. John describes as strong. He does not fumble with the stopper in the vase-held forces of good. "If you believe," he cries, "what Christ lived believing and died believing, then break the vase, and do not keep as a private possession powers that are meant for the world. Do not keep as a personal luxury what is meant to be the family treasure." Such a young man is the living exegesis of Christ's revolutionary word: "The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force."

When he is warned not to expect too much from human nature, not to put too much trust in men, not to waste his strength in trying to remove mountains, not to jeopardize his chances on the threshold of manhood in trying to serve a world which, so far from thanking him, will very effectually resent his most disinterested efforts on its behalf; when he is reminded of some once aspirant who, young and confident as he, set out to reform the world, and now cynically affirms that the only wisdom is to let the world go to the devil in its own way--the young man who is strong says: "I acknowledge your facts, such as they are, but they are not facts for me. I, too, may be beaten in the right, but I would rather be that a thousand times over than succeed in the wrong. It is the temptation of the wicked one to conclude that, because history is said to have repeated itself hitherto, it must needs repeat itself for ever. I do not live on history; I live to make history. I believe that I was sent into the world new from the fashioning hand of the Creator, and that I have a new man's work to do. If my life of faith on the Son of God seem recklessness to you, wanting in proportion and eccentric, hold your opinions for all they are worth; but you shall not influence me by your abandoned hopes, you shall not even chill me with the east wind of your selfish ethics."

These are the young men we need to-day. Strong in hope, in position, and in daring; strong in the strength which they find in their years, and the strength they put into them.

And the Church has a right, society has a right, the nation has a right to look to young men for a greater and a better future. We who are older have a claim to look to you to confirm our faith in the survival of Christianity as the living force of the future. We need fresh leaders and men who incarnate new forces. We need, in fact, a certain style of man--we never needed him more. We want young men who are inspired by the truth that ideas are realities, and that scepticism about high principles is the most destructive form of ignorance.

We want young men of vision in business. Not cranks, not men who are responsible for their own failure in whatsoever their hand findeth to do; but men who see that the institution of business is God's present plan for distributing wealth, comfort, and intelligence. We want men in law who shall realize that the function of the legal profession is to build up justice and ensphere it in the will of the people. We want men in politics who have a clear conception of what the kingdom of God is, who recognize that the work of legislation and legislators is to think and speak and act for the interests of that kingdom--in the spirit and on the basis of Divine Fatherhood and human brotherhood. And in the pulpit we want men who have in them the vision of an Isaiah, a Paul, a John, and a Luther; men who shall make themselves felt as perennial gifts to their day--to tell us what we can do and what we ought to do, to lift up a voice for the eternally true, amid the clamour of self-interest and cries of craven fear.

"The world needs nothing more; the great English-speaking race has no need comparable with this need of men who can carry the spirit of vision, which is really the power of achievement, into every phase of our individual and collective life."

Many of you represent great possibilities. You are, or you ought to be, at the flow-tide of an untainted enthusiasm. Your life should be a moral heat, which radiates in ever-enlarging circles of hope and service. But there are fires which, once they are allowed to slow down, can never be rekindled. There are large and generous beliefs at twenty-five years of age which, unless we cultivate and keep ourselves in the love of them, thin out like wasting magic, and no necromancy can ever conjure them back again. You young men have potencies of hope and enthusiasm which, if denied expression, strike inwardly and corrupt the source out of which they came.

And now, I repeat, is the time when you can give a true man's best hostages to the future. Now is the time to make the most of your strategic places in life. Almost before you know it, your power to determine many things will have merged into obligations that not one man in fifty is free to disregard. While it is called your day--before you are compassed behind and before with a commonplace that locks up so many lives like a numbing fate--signalize your record by some bit of heroism. If you would have posterity call you wise, seize your chance, while you have it, to be God's fool. Find the faith that can help you to play a man's part in the world; find in your faith the power which can grasp you by your weakness and sin, and lift you into strength and achievement. The Church needs you. For of all the institutions in Christendom the Church is stifled with safety, propriety, and conventional wisdom. It is the world which seems to monopolize the sparkle, the daring, and the picturesque. Respect us, your seniors in years, if we have done anything worthy in the past; but do not let it influence you unduly if now we seem to you perhaps timid and conservative. Time will bring most of you to the same place. But if--which God forbid--you do little after, do at least something now to redeem your career from impotence or from miserable aims that all end in selfishness. Find, I say again, on the threshold of your years, the power that can grasp you by your real requirement. Your first need is not wisdom, but grace; it is not education, but regeneration; it is not an ideal even, but a Saviour. Wisdom, education, and moral enthusiasms are but the machinery of our uplifting, the driving-power is Life. You know the Source of this power; you know the way to Him of Whom it is written: "In Him was life; and the life was the light of men." Now is your accepted time--

"Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute: What you can do, or dream you can, begin it; Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Only engage, and then the mind grows heated; Begin, and then the work will be completed."

Robert Collyer.

Dr. Maclaren.

Dr. Lyman Abbot.

THE WORSHIP OF LUCK

"The lot is cast into the lap; but the whole disposing thereof is of the Lord."--Proverbs xvi. 33.

THE WORSHIP OF LUCK

It is reported that Prince Bismarck once and again attributed some of the most remarkable successes he had won in diplomacy to the circumstance that he had used truth as one of his greatest resources. Well aware of the fact that truth, for its own sake, was not the first thing that was expected from him, the use of truth gave him the tactical advantage of knowing how almost inevitably the opposite diplomacy would interpret it. He told the truth in order that it might be acted upon as something else. To adopt his own characteristic phrase, he "used the truth." If half the truth, or an untruth, would have served his purpose better, either most likely would have been adopted and as readily used.

We preachers tell young men that whether or not they get on in business, they cannot afford not to go up in character; and they are not in the world very long before they realize that its hopes in this admonition are but inverted fears, that the shake of its head is a scepticism which troubles not to articulate itself in words. A French cynic counsels us to always deal with a friend to-day on the possibility that he may be an enemy to-morrow. And there is a wide and deeply-rooted prejudice in favour of holding the imperatives of integrity on the same terms. Our very language in this direction betrays us. We talk about "smart" business men, "smart" professional men, and by the adjective we may mean men who, though "keen," are yet honourable in their methods; or we may mean men who are just as scrupulous as the law of the land or the arbitrary criterions of society oblige them to be. And young men feel the impress of this widely-shared sentiment in a way particularly vivid. They have, indeed, small chance to escape it. The world is profuse in its explanations of why men fail, but it has no mercy on the man who fails. It has its cheap jargon about inheritances and environment, and then kicks the man who is preached as their victim, into perdition. Our operations may not be nice, but young men soon find out, or they think they do, that it is success, not charity, which covers a multitude of sins. Hence the new commandment: "With all thy getting, get success"--

"Get place and wealth, if possible with grace, If not, by any means get wealth and place."

The clamant need of our day is a clear teaching that shall appeal to us all, but especially to young men, as to what are the things that cannot be shaken, the things inseparable from a human life that is worth living. It is easy to part with our fine sense of integrity, but, once it is gone, it is the hardest thing in the world to recover. There are more senses than one in which we may speak of riches that are "beyond the dreams of avarice." The most valuable possession any man can have is the fight, either in his own conscience or to the world, to affirm himself to be an honest man. And the position I shall maintain in this address is, that there can be no sure success without honesty. Nor shall I speak about "absolute honesty" or the "strictest honesty," for I agree with those who say that there is but one degree of honesty. It is not a quality with grades and modulations. As well think, or try to think, of grades and modulations in the chastity of man and woman. Honesty, like chastity, is, or it is not.

We are often told that, from the lowest possible commercial standpoint, honesty is not only the best policy, it is the only policy. Whether or not it is the only policy depends upon the meaning we import into the term; of this I am sure--it is the best policy. But I shall not urge this doctrine upon you from the lower standpoint. That might do more than insult your intelligence; it would, I trust, offend against your moral self-respect. I assume that you all would hold it true with Archbishop Whately when he says, that though "honesty is the best policy, he is not an honest man who is honest for that reason." If, then, these latter remarks can carry the weight I want them to bear, what of those that have preceded them? How are we to explain a sentiment which is virtually a religion, having this one article for its creed: that honesty, while good as an ideal, cannot be invariably relied upon for practical concerns? How is it that so many men have to discover, when they are no longer young, that the thing which has passed from them and which they cannot recall is, after all, the one supreme value they possessed? There are many explanations of this tragedy, for tragedy it is, and not the least of them is, that so many young men have but one conception, one definition of success. These are men, and one is tempted to think at times that they are not so much a class as a people, who want material success and seek nothing else. They have no other standard by which to judge the thing behind the word. Not what we are, but what we have, if the latter is substantial and declarative, is the only idea which multitudes have of success. In a clever character-study of a well-known public man we are told that, "As far as he has a philosophy at all, it is this, that merit rides in a motor-car." It is a definition which fosters the impression that success can be secured the more quickly and surely by methods that are bound up with smartness, chance, or luck.

It is with the last of these I would come into somewhat close quarters. And let me admit, in the first place, that there is such a thing as luck, using the word in its common acceptation. In what is called a scientific treatment of the subject in hand I ought to say, as exactly as I can, what I myself understand by luck. It will leave abundance of room for criticism if I venture to define it--as some advantage that comes to a man independent of his moral worth, his native gifts, or of any equivalent he has rendered for it of industry and self-denial. That some people have such an advantage it would be useless to deny. Two youths, let us say, enter a business house about the same age, and at the same time. They are, as near as can be, equally matched in equipment to command success. In this respect there is little to choose between them. One begins entirely on his merits; he has no influence behind him to open doors before him as by some invisible hand. The other has influence; no matter what it is, or how it works, he has it, and it operates distinctly in his favour. A few years after, and the latter has far out distanced the former in position, salary, and outlook. And the reason is not the capacity of either; it is the arbitrary advantage, the piece of luck that one has had over the other from the start. "He has not much ability," I heard it remarked lately of a young fellow who, just having been licensed to preach, had also received a "call" to an influential church, and the remark elicited the significant answer: "No, but whether he has ability or not, his father has position and influence." This hints to us why certain men, if they do not fill, yet hold the positions they do. Take some men in high places, say in the political world. Recall a few names, if you can, of men who have held great positions in the State within the last quarter of a century, and does any sane person contend that in ability they stand out sheer above ten thousand good average men who crowd about them? I think it was Sydney Smith who said it was about equal to being canonized to marry into certain families. And a man would need to be a very emphasized fool quite to spoil the advantages of a long line of position, privilege, and family ascendency.

Take, again, a more typical case of what I mean by luck. It came under my own notice. A cloth-worker in Yorkshire, by carelessness or inadvertence, raises the nap of a given fabric a shade above the regulation height. He is dismissed, and the cloth is laid aside as spoiled. A French buyer comes in the place, and casting his eyes on it, instantly sees for it a future. That touch of heightened nap has done it. The manufacturer has his wits about him, and what a week before was a mistake is now a new and valuable design which, in a couple of years, makes him what some of us would regard as a substantial fortune. We are usually told that to admit the operation of this questionable factor in human affairs, called chance or luck, is inconsistent with a belief in the moral government of God, or, as we may prefer to call it, the reign of law. If this is so, how are we to read those old words that "chance happeneth to them all"? If we seriously contend that everything which happens in our human life is in accord with God's plans in us, and working through us, then I see not how we can refuse to hold such fore-ordination responsible for the grotesque, the irrational, the sinister, and the wicked in our actions. I could understand the objection were it limited to Nature, because that is a sphere in which it is the uses of things, and the uses precisely, which are the most obvious, and these compose, when taken together, a mighty reciprocal whole in which part answers to part, constituting an all-comprehensive and wondrous whole. There is no place in Nature for chance. Every particle of air is governed by laws of as great precision as the laws of the heavenly bodies. It keeps its appointed order, it serves its appointed ends. Nature never breaks out of its place. It has no such power--but human nature has. Man has enough free-will to make him responsible for what he does with it, and in the exercise of this mighty prerogative enters the element of chance or luck. We cannot establish free-will by rules of logic, we cannot gainsay it on the score of conviction. It helps us to interpret the great in human life and history, and what is sometimes even more to the purpose, it helps us to account for the little. As it has been well said: "It would save us much mental perplexity if we could assert without qualification that all is law, that everything happens as God ordains."

But God cannot make two mountains without a valley between; and He cannot give us free-will and withhold from us at the same time the freedom to make mistakes. The contradictions in human life do not yield to verbal simplicities, and, whether we like it or not, we have to acknowledge that this something called luck is a force in human events.

But let me say, in the second place, that there is nothing more easy than to exaggerate its extent and importance. Out of a hundred happenings that are generally attributed to luck, if we could find the genesis of each one and trace its evolution or unfolding, we should probably not find more than one that could be associated with the things that happen by chance. The case of a man who achieved what is called a "lucky fluke" out of a piece of spoiled cloth is perhaps the only instance of its kind on record in the history of cloth manufacture. I have admitted that there are cases where advantage falls to a man which cannot be explained by anything he deserves, or has done to win it. And the advantage, such as it is, often works untold hurt as an example. Just as the winnings of one gambler may tempt a hundred others to their undoing, so a single case of coveted luck is apt to encourage young men to transfer their hopes of success in many directions, from law to luck. You see here and there a man who accumulates a large fortune from beginnings that look as much like pure chance as was that piece of spoiled cloth. You see men close to you put into positions that have been secured, not by training or ability to fill them, but by the accident of influence, or, as you may think, by even more reprehensible methods; and your first impulse is to say that it is not merit but luck that holds the better cards. But let the impulse pass and bring quiet thought and good practical sense to this problem of success in men, and you will find that the instances are comparatively few where it is not about as wise to speak of it as luck as it would be so to characterize the law of cause and consequence. When you are discussing a man's success or his position, do not stop at the mere fact that he has it--that is obvious enough; try to know how he got it, and you may be surprised to find how little, after all, luck has had to do with it. In one of the most quoted of our Lord's parables we are told that "they that were ready went in to the marriage feast." And this right of entry was not a matter of luck. They went in because they were ready, and the others were left out because they had made no effort to be ready. And so if you would understand a man's success, know what he was doing while the opportunity tarried, while his chance seemed to wait, while his "psychological moment" appeared to linger.

Our fate or our fortune is not in great occasions; it is in our readiness to seize the opportunities that make great occasions. We frequently hear young men complain that they have not had a chance. Are they always sure of that? How often is it that their chance has been and gone, without their knowing it? "There are scores of young fellows in our place," said a large employer of labour lately, "who would be in vastly better positions than they are, had they worked as hard to be ready for the better positions as they are anxious to have them." There are multitudes of young men who appear to have lost sight of the distinction there may be between wishing for an opportunity and being ready to use the opportunity when it presents itself. As Sir Frederick Treves once said to the students at the Aberdeen University: "The man who is content to wait for a stroke of good fortune will probably wait until he has a stroke of paralysis." He who waits for good fortune without doing his part to make it possible, opens up the way for lazy habits and morbid conclusions about the arrangements of life. Luck in any serious business or profession is not so much the coming of opportunity as readiness to make the most of the opportunity when it comes. A man was speaking to me not long ago about one of the leading commercial men in this city. "What is there in him or about him to explain his success?" asked the man, and he answered his own question with the round assertion that "it was all luck." It happened that I had some reliable information about the man under discussion, and I want you to have it. Thirty years ago he was working from ten to twelve hours in the day as just an ordinary workman. At the close of each day's toil he had his programme of studies, which, in its range and character of the subjects attacked, would not have disgraced a good student at any university. Eventually his attention to business and his marked attainments won for him the recognition of his employers, which meant in after years a place which was ultimately a leading place, as one of them. Yet this was the man who was said to have won his success by a lucky turn of the wheel. I admit his advantages. I grant you that he showed himself to have brains and will above the average endowment of these great possessions. But let me ask you to mark this: he might have left his gifts unused, as so many of us do. It is probably not gifts, in eight cases out of every ten, that determine position, but our use of them. We have infinitely more in us than our will and determination ever bring out. How few of us know the rich things God has put in our nature; and we verily live and die in ignorance of rare deposits of wealth because we do not work the inward mines. This young man was wiser. He did not wait for his opportunity to turn up, he turned up the opportunity. Because he neither slumbered nor slept while it tarried, he was prepared to make the most of it when it presented itself. And I am persuaded that something like this is the true explanation of practically the whole of what thoughtless people set down to luck. What we call fore-ordination is verily the present which we have made out of the past. We first make habits, and then habits make us. In our to-day walks our to-morrow, and in a very solemn sense there is no "dead past." As it has been well said, "the tree that falls so disastrously is no accident; it had the fall determined a century ago in some injury it received as a sapling."

You young men cannot make up your mind too soon that there can be no sure success apart from uprightness and integrity. You cannot too early in this life settle it as an immovable truth for you, that unswerving rectitude is not only a great and desirable ideal, it is the only practical course you can afford to follow. Goodness, I say again, is the only success, and I shall not try to save this statement by fencing the word "success" with any arbitrary definition of my own. I just mean by it what any man means by it who has a healthy moral perception of things. Success, like honesty, has but one degree, and as nothing is worthy to be called life which cannot be affirmed of God, so nothing can be called success which is not the resultant of right-doing. Every advantage which you would try to scheme or sneak or coerce in face of the protest of conscience, has in it its own curse and its certain defeat. Understand me: right-doing will not necessarily help you to make a fortune or achieve some great position. You may not have the special gifts to do either. Such gifts are something not ourselves which we might easily have been without. Neither religion nor morality promises to bestow these gifts, any more than religion or morality claims to regulate the colour of our hair or the inches of our stature. But when said, there is yet a wonderful power in right-doing. The man who does the right because he believes in it and loves it, whether it is called successful or not, is always bringing out far more than he thought was in him. The faithful doing of daily duty continually reveals opportunities which, used with readiness and a good conscience, act upon life with a perpetual and gracious benediction.

Then what about the end? It may seem a far-off cry to talk to you young men about that. But the end will come, and you will need nothing then which you do not need all the way. The end will only emphasize the need--the need of a good conscience. The day is coming when all tainted success will mock, as only a bad record can mock, when there is but time left to regret, and none to retrieve the past. "I am getting old," writes one, "and I am wealthy; but I would part with every shilling I possess, and take my risk for bread, to be at peace with my own conscience." Trample under your feet the immoral side of the maxim that nothing succeeds like success. Success is not always in hitting the things at which you aim; it is the good conscience that you are aiming only at right things. Let your success be goodness, and goodness will be your success. Leave luck to fools, and act as though it had no existence. Believe that character or manhood, without which nothing great is possible, is the content of your endowment put out to full advantage through grace and will. Believe that every man, worthy to be called a man, has in him the promise of the gradual supremacy of character over the accidents and happenings of circumstances. Be, then, your own luck. Link your life in Christ to God, and stand up to all the world and say--

"Perish policy and cunning, Perish all that fears the light. Whether losing, whether winning, Trust in God and do the right."

Rev. Thomas Templeton, M.A.

A DEVIL'S TRINITY

"Know ye not that ye are a temple of God?"--I Corinthians iii. 16.

A DEVIL'S TRINITY

There are expressions taken from the Bible which, by length of popular usage, become, as it were, independent either of their setting, or of methods of exposition. This usage has its length of days, not always in the sense of the expression so much as in its sound. Those of you who have been accustomed to listen to Christian preaching will have often heard appeals to your manhood, to self-mastery, to kingship over your habitudes, rounded off with this question: "Know ye not that ye are a temple of God?"

In this way it has passed into what I have called popular usage. And whatever it may be as exegesis, it is good admonition. If we may speak of a house made with hands as a dwelling-place of the Most High, we may also claim an equal sacredness for this mortal temple which is the crowning achievement of His creative power.

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