templation than it is in practice. The real difficulty in eight out
of every ten of the critical places in life is not what is in them, but
what we imagine is in them. Let it be felt that the things you hold to
be wrong must expect from you neither compromise nor show of
friendship; that you are the open and declared enemy of unclean speech,
filthy jesting, secret sins, with their hints and implied fascinations,
brainless pursuits, frivolous conversation, and low down levels of
existence, and, with the exception of those whose enmity it is a
distinction to have, people will come to realize that your position is
neither that of the religious crank nor of self-righteous conceit--that
it is the expression and outcome of your reverence for whatsoever
things are pure and lovely and of good report.

Human society has no need more pressing than its need of young men and
women with moral courage and religious conviction to take up the right
attitude to wrong things. "Know ye not that whoever will be the friend
of the world is the enemy of God?" When Saul was found in a certain
company he had ceased to respect himself. This is why he was found
there; and these two things were more than enough to sweep his life to
its tragic close. How many of us have read this man's life-finish?
Let me suggest to you something new to read. A story that has in it
more elemental material than half the fiction that ever was written, or
half the facts that mortgage the attention of a superficial world.
Read that chapter where Saul, face to face with the last things in his
darkened career, and hard upon the Nemesis of his own evil past, seeks
out the woman with the familiar spirit, and in the words that he
addresses to the apparition which he conjures up before his distorted
vision you have the confession of a lost soul: "The Philistines make
war against me, and the Lord answered me no more, neither by prophet
nor by dream." "I have read nothing," says a well-known novelist,
"quite like this man's experience in its utter abandon of lonely
horror."

Think what you may about the setting of this story, you will be
strangely lacking in moral insight if you miss the meaning that
pulsates through the words that were wrung out of Saul in his
extremity. They point to the lost, which once lost is lost for ever.
Even God, I say again, cannot give us back the yesterdays. Once they
are gone we can only say: "That which is written is written."

Many