e sane and rational ideas and habits of life, without which
society but personifies the unscrupulous and vulgar parvenu. And in
religion he can accept the teaching and obey the commands of Christ
without any overwhelming temptation to escape them behind some
exegetical device or the plea of expediency. He can devote the rose
bloom of his years to great principles, before he has had time to catch
the infection of a commonplace belief in God. He can be a soldier of
the Cross, and have himself placed in the forefront of the battle. He
can go down into the pit to rescue the perishing, and take daring,
awful risks for the Captain of his salvation and the race of which he
forms a part. I have written unto you, young men, because you can
afford to be strong.

A third, and for my present purpose a closing consideration in a young
man's strength is--Audacity. I might call it courage, but it is that
plus something else. It is courage carried to a point of daring that
amounts to what I have called it, audacity, or, as the world would call
it, foolhardiness. It is the merciful blindness which will not see
difficulties; it is the glorious recklessness which will not be stopped
by them. It is neither blindness nor recklessness; it is the baptism
with which a young man must be baptized whose life is penalized for the
Cross.

When a certain woman came into the presence of Jesus, and anointed Him
with an ointment very precious, He answered the selfish criticism of
some of the disciples with the unqualified remark that "long as His
Gospel should be preached, this that she had done would be told for a
memorial of her." To these disciples it is probable that the answer
sounded like a benediction on waste. Jesus saw in the deed an abandon
on the side of good, which on the side of evil makes evil so popular
and, as it seems at times, almost universal. No one but a woman,
unless it were a young man of true fibre, would have broken the vessel.
Your middle-aged or old man would have cautiously taken out the
stopper, that the costly unguent might have been expended economically,
even on the Saviour. But this woman, in her uncalculating devotion,
broke the vessel, that all its contents might issue forth in one
consecrated gift of love. And it was what this broken vase symbolized
that explains, or does something to explain, the unmeasured recognition
of the action.

This is the moral temper of the young man whom St. John describes