Young Men; In Business

by William Guest; J. D. Wells

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 diligence by the side of the conductor. How invigorating was the fresh mountain-air of the morning, like the first love of a young heart to Christ. But as the road toiled upward, 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 uninvaded 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 of waters. There behind was the river, gliding 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 rapturous hours we went higher; and as we ascended, fresher grew the air, more beautiful the leaping waterfalls, more sublime the pass through galleries of rocky labyrinths, more thrilling the transition from gloomy defiles 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 everlasting hills.

In a loftier sense than this, higher and even higher may be a Christian young man’s progress. Follow him. He is active and devoted in all that blesses man; he rises in harmony of character and effectiveness of influence; he comes to have a name in the community of men, and is a man of mark among his fellows; to those coming on the stage of life he becomes the pattern-man; and those who once sneered at his decision and aspirations 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 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 welcomed 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 companion 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 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 expanded 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 except it be given him from heaven.” “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above.”

I do not mean to affirm that you are to be passive. Go again to nature to learn her parable. The plant grows by receiving; but it is not, like rocks and stones, dull and inert; it avails itself of its advantages for growth. It coöperates 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 young man, study your nature. In the truly-developed man there are three powers—body, soul, spirit. This three-fold distinction which is made in the Bible, remarkable to say, is also that of the latest and maturest 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 all your endowments. There, unthought of, it may be, is that divine faculty which separates you from the brutes and allies you to the seraphim. There, smouldering in darkness or selfishness, is a spirit which nothing earthly can satisfy; which sends forth aspirations 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 become the dominant principle, and bring all evil into subjection to itself, and become elevated in wisdom and ascendency, till, shaking off every encumbrance of corruption, its powers 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 Godward 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 trust, and appropriate him in all his personality 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 diamonds, 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 was opened. Its power of receiving had freedom. It now allowed the minutest 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 implore you, to the cry of your own immortal spirit. Open your nature, that you may receive the quickening life of the Almighty. You hear at this time much about religious cant and hypocrisy. It seems as if even the better class of novelists of our period could never expound their own moral principles without a contemptuous sneer at the religious phraseology or life of their fellow-Christians. But let me tell you, the cant which is the most irrational, and the hypocrisy 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 quivering beech-leaves should be ashamed of the sunbeams that dance on their smooth surface; 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 receiving illumination and impulse, wisdom and elevation, from the Father of your spirit, is the most pitiable misjudgment of which any creature can be capable. Talk of religious cant—there is no cant that is so hateful, because there is no cant that is so unreflecting and senseless, as that which sneers at man having fellowship with his Maker. It is God, my brother, who gives to every star its brightness, 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 movements of God, it will glow, develop, acquire ascendence; 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 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 institutions; 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 uncongenial 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, 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, deadens religious capacity, extinguishes holy susceptibility, darkens the understanding to the things of God, 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 wander for ever in the unknown realms of disloyalty and everlasting darkness?