Five Young Men: Messages of Yesterday for the Young Men of To-day

by Charles Reynolds Brown

Hang those great words up in your mind! Hang the picture of that strong, stern, brave man in your heart that you too may wear the cross of honour.

If it is good for men to be sober and clean in war time, why not at all times? Have we not sore need of these same qualities in the more exacting pursuits of peace? Every man who is worthy of the name of man is set to guard some sacred interest, though he carries neither gun nor sword.

Here is the everlasting fight being waged three hundred and sixty-five days in the year—and it is waged year in and year out for there is no discharge in that war—against hunger and cold, against disease and death, against poverty and crime! Why not have men at their best in the mill and in the mine, on the farm and in the factory, in the counting-room and in the places of trade? The armies which are sent forth to save, to feed, and to clothe men's lives, no less than the armies of bloodshed have need of the same high discipline. They, too, are crippled and broken, they are driven back and hurled to defeat by those moral foes which march under the banner of self-indulgence.

Here is an evil traffic which flaunts its wares in our faces in every city block where the forces of righteousness have not risen in strength to cast it out. But we have fallen upon times when the economic forces are lining up solidly with the verdict of medical science and the power of religion in a relentless opposition to the use of alcohol as a beverage. In these days the man who thinks more of his job than he does of his grog has the floor.

The wise railroad managers know full well that a tippler in the cab of an engine or at the flagman's post means sooner or later a frightful accident with loss of property and life. The owners of intricate and delicate machinery in the great factories know that placing in control men whose brains have been clogged and drugged with liquor is as foolish as throwing sand into the ball bearings. "Safety First" means "Sober First." The taxpayers are becoming no less insistent—they have learned that the open saloon means added crime and poverty where they must foot the bills. Decent people have grown tired of cleaning up the muss and the dirt occasioned by the rum sellers. The moral forces of the community recognize the fact that the liquor business allies itself openly with immoralities of every sort. The people are saying in state after state, in country after country, "Time's up! You have failed to show your right to be! You will have to go." The habit of indulgence in that which robs men of strength, of intelligence, of conscience, finds every good man's hand against it.

We read in this strange story that Samson's strength was in his hair. When his locks were cut away by the fair and false hand of evil he was as weak as a woman.

How much of sober history and how much of poetic allegory there may be in these glowing statements it is not easy to say. But the moral content of this record is clear. When those slender and delicate lines of contact which, as he believed according to his vow as a Nazarite, bound him in loyalty to the source of all strength, were broken, then his splendid prowess was no more. "It is that little half-inch rim of the tree where the sap runs up to the sun that makes the tree alive or dead." However you phrase it in the clearer light of this twentieth century of ours, guard with all diligence those lines of communication between your own inner life and the life of God. Maintain within yourself that faith and hope and love which will bring to you your own full measure of strength and joy.

The dull, sad picture of this defeated man is not wholly unrelieved by any brighter touch. When he was shorn of his strength, robbed of his honour, stained in the quality of his manhood, we read, "Howbeit the hair of his head began to grow again after he was shorn."

It was only a gleam of hope, but it was a gleam. It was a far-off promise of that divine redemptive process which has become the basis of our trust. His claim upon the divine favour and his hold upon the sources of strength were not utterly forfeited by his acts of evil-doing. His hair began to grow again and a hope of moral recovery was begotten in his heart. "If we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves; but if we confess our sins He is faithful and just to forgive us and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness."

Let me close with this plain, straight word of appeal as strong as I can make it! You need God in your life. You need Him not as a philosophical belief touching the origin and ground of all finite existence; not as a mere dogma to be written at the head of your Confession of Faith; not as a name to be introduced into some liturgy which you may occasionally employ. You need God as a present, personal and profound experience. To know Him is to live, and to live well.