this
present time undergoing a process of continual and momentous change, that
every day, or week, or month leaves its mark upon it; and that your
soul's life means not waiting for some angel of God's providential grace
to visit you and carry you up into a new air; but it means that you are
weaving the web of your unchangeable destiny by your use or abuse of the
gifts of God that are in your hands to-day.

Born into the world with the taint of inherited corruption in us, as also
with the germs of pure affection and high instinct and purpose, we have
to take care for ourselves and for each other that the taint does not eat
out the good, by growing into sins of boyhood or of youth, or by
hardening into depraved habits in our manhood. If we let our youth take
an unhappy downward course, whether in taste or habit, every day puts
salvation farther off from us, because every day any fault which is
indulged or nursed tends to grow deeper and more inveterate; and yet,
forgetting this, how many, while their early years are running to waste,
nurse the vain hope that some day they will receive the sudden baptism of
a new birth.

So, then, instead of vaguely trusting, any of us, to the hope of what
some future call or help or happy visitation may do for us, let us obey
the Divine injunction, which, when rightly understood, is very pressing,
urging us, as we hope to see good days, to be very jealous of our present
life and its tendencies; let us do this, standing always firm and
immovable in the things that are pure and of good report.

However it may be in some other matters, in this matter of our moral and
spiritual life, the greatest, the most important, the most serious thing
of all, it is almost invariably true that the child is father of the man,
and we feel that we have no right to expect it to be otherwise. In our
everyday consideration of life, we recognise all this: we speak of growth
in character and formation of habit as facts which no one would ignore,
and which cannot be overestimated. But to acknowledge these, and at the
same time to trust that God will hereafter arrest any stream of sinful
tendency in us which we ourselves do not attempt to stop now, is to add
presumption to sin.

When we speak of Heaven and Hell, we have in our thoughts the vision of
those ultimate points towards which the diverging courses of men's lives
are slowly tending day by day. And the question rises: "On which of
these lines is my