choose? So far as this question
affects middle life, it is largely because so few of us have the grit
to face its difficulties, and attack them, when we have to do it with
the serious handicap of self-made disadvantages. It is while you are
young that you must lay up these stores of living material for the
after years; and this is the significance of it all--you can only do
it, or you can do it most effectually, when you are young. As touching
certain advantages, "the day after to-morrow is the only day that never
comes."

Have your good time, I say, and in it fear God, and fear nothing else.
Keep a clean youth, and enjoy it to the full. But let the thought have
its place as a goad when required, or as a steadying influence when the
spirits would gallop too fast--the thought in the question: How will it
be with me when my years are thirty-five or forty? That trying, and in
so many cases, that fatal forty! When the youth of "rose-light and
romance has faded into the light of common day, and the horizon of life
has shrunk incalculably, and when the flagging spirit no longer answers
to the spur of external things, but must find its motive and energy
from within, or find them not at all." See to it while you may, that
these forces, when needed, are there, or whatever else you may gain
will be but a mocking remembrancer of the greater thing you have lost.

I have but another word to add. If there are, as I trust there are,
middle-aged, or even old men, who would leave this Ur of the Chaldees,
with all its unworthy past, and make for a better country, do not, I
plead with you, be discouraged by anything I have said. Remember, I
have been talking to the young; but God forbid that what I have said to
them should seem to exclude hope for you. Make your start, though you
should get no further than Haran. In a matter so supreme, it is better
to have tried and failed, than never to have tried at all. But you
need not fail in any degree that success is possible to you; and a
success is possible to you in which are issues of everlasting life.
Whatever the past, build up with courage and humility what you can do.
God willing, and by His grace, you have time yet to prove how a
consecrated determination can stretch out life's limits, and wondrously
redeem no little of past failure.

YOUTH'S STRATEGIC PLACES

"I have written unto you, young men, because ye are strong."--1 St.
John ii. 14.

II

YOUTH'S STRATEGI