Dangers and Duties of Youth
209
speeches and apt remarks, and because you are cheerful, lively, and
witty, and not because of intellectual and moral worth, you will be
looked upon by sensible, godly men and women as an object of pity
rather than envy. You should be guarded against flattery. Whoever
is foolish enough to flatter you cannot be your true friend. Your true
friends will caution, entreat, and warn you, and reprove your faults.
You have opened your mind to dark unbelief. Close it in the fear of
God. Seek for the evidences, the pillars, of our faith and lay hold upon
them with firm grasp. You need this confidence in present truth, for it
will prove an anchor to you. It will impart to your character an energy,
efficiency, and noble dignity that will command respect. Encourage
habits of industry. You are seriously lacking here. Both you and your
brother have brilliant ideas of success, but remember that in God is
your only hope. Your prospects may at times look flattering to you,
but anticipations which exalt you above simple, humble home duties,
and above religious duties, will prove a failure. You, my dear young
friends, need to humble your hearts before God and be obtaining a
rich and valuable experience in the Christian life by following on to
know the Lord and blessing others by daily lives of spotless purity, of
noble integrity, of thoroughness in the performance of Christian duty
and the duties of practical life. You have duties to do at home; you
have responsibilities to bear which you have not yet lifted.
That which ye sow ye shall also reap. These young men are now
sowing the seed. Every act of their lives, every word spoken, is a seed
for good or evil. As is the seed, so will be the crop. If they indulge
hasty, lustful, perverted passions or give up to the gratification of ap-
petite or the inclination of their unsanctified hearts; if they foster pride
or wrong principles and cherish habits of unfaithfulness or dissipation,
they will reap a plentiful harvest of remorse, shame, and despair.
[227]
Angels of God are seeking to lead these young men to cry unto
the Lord in sincerity: “Be Thou the guide of my youth.” Angels are
inviting and seeking to draw them from the snares of Satan. Heaven
may be theirs if they will seek to obtain it. A crown of immortal glory
will be theirs if they will give all for heaven.
* * * * *