ar to the legions who, once in Ur of the Chaldees, have neither
thought nor desire for a better country? While, again, they may leave
it from anything but worthy motives. Men may be compelled to change
their habits without changing their natures. It is really to multiply
words to no profit to debate the question. Your instinct tells you
that it would be wickedness to encourage you to take your "fling" in Ur
of the Chaldees on the risk that you can get away from it when prudence
speaks the word. Settle it, then, as true for you, that out of to-day
walks a to-morrow; and that what you shall do with to-morrow is
practically determined by what you are doing to-day.

This counsel, or admonition, cannot be over-emphasized. I assume that
I am talking to young men who do not intend to make a failure of life;
then, I tell you again, that you must seize the one great chance you
have, to make it a success.

Permit me now to apply very briefly what has been so far advanced,
first, to your pleasures; and, secondly, to something more important to
you than old age, and that is--middle life.

To everything, says the Preacher, there is a time and a season, and it
must be that youth is the time for amusements and pleasures, which are
not so much the privileges of youth as native to it. We are told that
Darwin in his old age expressed regret that he had deprived himself of
so many of the pleasures and resources of life by his concentration
upon that study, the results of which have made his name so justly
famous. He gave to get; but he lived to doubt his own right to pay the
price. And no young man should give place, no not for a moment, to a
doctrine of work which excludes his right to the joys and abandon of
his years. There is danger, and very real danger, lest we should take
for granted what the "Grad-grinds" tell us, that the only thing which
matters is that we do work, and are not idle. Work for its own sake is
not enough. It may turn men into machines--all clatter and monotony;
or it may make them fussy nuisances. "A soulless activity," says Canon
Ainger, "may save a man from vagrancy only by turning him into a thing;
or it may keep him from idleness by making him an egotist." There is
the man who, to use the common phrase, "sticks at it" with scarcely a
competing thought or interest. He scorns ease, and lives laborious
days. For what? I once heard it said, and I believe it was true, of a
prosperous Yorkshireman,