, to general views, perhaps too much; but
all the time my mind has been fixed on the particular application of
this, which lies scarcely beneath the surface, but which I cannot well
bear more fully to unveil. But whoever has attended to what I have been
saying, will be able, I should trust, to make the application, for
himself, to those points in our society which most need correction. He
will be able to understand how it is that the influence of the place is
not better, while it undoubtedly contains so much of good; how the
public opinion of a Christian school may yet be, in many respects, very
unchristian. If he has attended at all to what I have said about our so
rarely being in earnest, he will see something of the mischief of some
of those publications, of those books, of that tone of conversation,
which, I suppose, are here, as elsewhere, in fashion. Utterly impossible
is it to lay down a rule for others in such matters: to say this book is
too light, or this is an excess of light reading, or this laugh was too
unrestrained, or that tone of trifling too perpetual. But, in these
things, we should all judge ourselves; and remember that you are so
little under outward restraint, your choice of reading is so free, your
intercourse with one another so wholly uncontrolled, that, enjoying thus
the full liberty of more advanced years, you incur also their
responsibility. There is, doubtless, an excess of light reading, both in
kind and in quantity; there is such a thing as a tone of conversation
and manner too entirely, and too frequently, trifling. And you must be
quite aware that we are placed here for something else than to indulge
such a temper as this. Cheerfulness and thoughtlessness have no
necessary connexion; the lightest spirits, which are indeed one of the
greatest of earthly blessings, often play around the most earnest
thought and the tenderest affection, and with far more grace than when
they are united with the shallowness and hardness of him who is, in the
sight of God, a fool. It were a strange notion, that we could never be
merry without intoxication, yet not stranger than to think that mirth is
the companion only of folly or of sin. But, setting God in Christ before
us, then the conscience is awake; then we are in earnest; then we
measure things rightly; then we feel them strongly; then we love those
that are good, and shun those that are evil; then we learn that sin is
no matter of laughter, that it ill