Alas, wherever a young man turns for worldly amusement he meets danger. Large towns swarm with brilliantly lighted saloons, which hold out their meretricious attractions. There is the drama, music, and art. It was ascertained that in two hours one evening, six hundred young men entered one music hall in London. Were these rooms harmless, he would be an enemy to human happiness who objected to them. If they are demoralizing and ruinous to the health and character of the inexperienced, he is a friend who points this out. It is little suspected how women with bedizened head-dresses and flaunty robes are holding the last shred of their modesty; how married men hide under white waistcoats polluted hearts; how, while “gray hairs dance, devils laugh and angels weep;” how bankrupts wear forced smiles, and the wretched try their poor jokes; how the victims of disease and death hide their ghastliness by flowers, and light their rapid progress to the grave by flaring gas-light. It is little known how thousands of young men from the religious homes of Scotland and Wales pass into a speedy oblivion after their feet have once crossed the threshold of these rooms in English cities. Alas, what a tale might be told of fathers’ hairs whitened, mothers’ hearts crushed, sisters’ eyes swollen with tears, over sons once the pride of their homes. If you would be pure, then, you must avoid these places. They will speedily prejudice you against religion. They will turn your doubts into blank unbelief and atheism. They will quench in you even the desire for immortality. They will turn into terror or scoffing every restraining influence. And what help can there then be for you for this world or for the next?
3. Have faith in the significance of your life. There is no exaggeration when a living writer says: “If there were the smallest star in heaven that had no place to fill, the oversight would beget a disturbance which no Leverrier could compute. One grain of sand, that did not fall into its place, would disturb, or even fatally disorder the whole scheme of the heavenly motions. Every particle of air has its appointed place, and serves its appointed end.” God, dear young man, means something by you. Yours may not be the highest, but there is some high work which you may fulfil. The low grass-tuft is not the branching cedar towering for centuries on Lebanon; nor is it the fragrant orange-blossom, which is plucked to deck the bridal wreath; but neither the orange-blossom nor cedar could render the service of that lowly grass-tuft. In sacred converse with your Maker, breathe the prayer, in this the formative period of your existence: “Lord, what wilt thou have me to do? Why have I an existence among these living souls of this creation? Why hast thou given me these grand and awful endowments of thought, reason, intelligence, speech? I look round on the universe, and see all creatures fulfilling their appointed service. I see the sun filling the whole hemisphere from day to day with his light and heat. I see at night the stars lighting up the arch of the firmament, each keeping his appointed place, the silent preacher of obedience to thy will. I see the bird that balances its pinions on the air, testifying of thy goodness. I learn that the tiny invisible insect is answering its purpose in preserving the salubrity of the atmosphere and the purity of the water. I find every fragrant violet of the hedgerow and every shock of corn fulfilling a mission of serving. I learn from thy word of the higher spirits that dwell in thy presence, that they have their appointed work; that angels are ministering spirits, and do thy commandments, hearkening to the voice of thy word; and as I thus behold a universe where each has its appointed place, I utter the prayer more earnestly, “What is the meaning of my life, Father of spirits? I share thy counsels; reveal thy thought respecting me.” Deeply am I convinced, my brother, that if with some such prayer you enter upon this period of your life, your existence wall prove no meaningless thing; it will be instinct with influence, and will have an end to which you will come with unutterable rapture.
I have in the foregoing considerations helped to answer the question how you may assert the power of your personal character. I by no means say that you should disparage associations. The most useless men are those who will never combine. Exaggerated individuality makes a man impracticable, and sometimes insupportable. On the other hand, our modern danger lies in another direction. It is so to shape ourselves by others as to destroy force and effectiveness.
Gibbon tells us a tragic history, which has been more amply narrated by Count Montalembert in his “Monks of the West.” The gladiatorial games of Rome were continued until the beginning of the sixth century of our era. They had turned a civilized people into savage cannibals. There, in that enormous amphitheatre, whose tiers rising above tiers remain to this day, tens of thousands of spectators looked down on the bloody spectacle, and thousands of victims were slaughtered. A holy man in the East heard of the deeds of blood. The fire of a righteous indignation seized him. He travelled to Rome; arrived there as the imperial games were being celebrated. His soul burned against the cruelty and the impiety. He entered the Colosseum; burst through the waves of the people all palpitating with ferocious curiosity. He threw himself between the gladiators engaged in the sanguinary combat. In the name of the God of heaven he commanded them to cease their murderous strife. The pagan multitude were for a moment panic-stricken with the holy audacity of the Christian. Then they cried out; they rose on him; they tore up the arches; stones hissed around him; the gladiators completed the work of death. But the blood of the martyr was the last shed in that arena. The horrid custom, which had so long resisted the voice of humanity, ended with that testimony. The nobleness of the sacrifice showed the horror of the abuse. The emperor Honorius proscribed the games of the gladiators, and they have never been revived.
Without any such sacrifice you may learn from it the might of a simple act of decision for truth and conscience, and that by such noble deeds your life may have immortal issues. Where the timid will start back in fear, there you may bless the coming ages. The achievements of duty have been grander than those of the warrior. Wordsworth says of duty:
“Flowers laugh before her in their beds,
And fragrance in her footsteps treads:
She does preserve the stars from wrong,
And the eternal heavens through her are fresh and strong.”