e a place
where the atmosphere makes great ideals contagious. That is the reason
that I said, though I had forgotten that I said it, what is quoted on
the outer page of the program--that you can test a modern community by
the degree of its interest in its Young Men's Christian Association. You
can test whether it knows what road it wants to travel or not. You can
test whether it is deeply interested in the spiritual and essential
prosperity of its rising generation. I know of no test that can be more
conclusively put to a community than that.

I want to suggest to the young men of this association that it is the
duty of young men not only to combine for the things that are good, but
to combine in a militant spirit. There is a fine passage in one of
Milton's prose writings which I am sorry to say I cannot quote, but the
meaning of which I can give you, and it is worth hearing.[E] He says
that he has no patience with a cloistered virtue that does not go out
and seek its adversary. Ah, how tired I am of the men who are merely on
the defensive, who hedge themselves in, who perhaps enlarge the hedge
enough to include their little family circle and ward off all the evil
influences of the world from that loved and hallowed group. How tired I
am of the men whose virtue is selfish because it is merely
self-protective! And how much I wish that men by the hundred thousand
might volunteer to go out and seek an adversary and subdue him!

I have had the fortune to take part in affairs of a considerable variety
of sorts, and I have tried to hate as few persons as possible, but there
is an exquisite combination of contempt and hate that I have for a
particular kind of person, and that is the moral coward. I wish we could
give all our cowards a perpetual vacation. Let them go off and sit on
the side lines and see us play the game; and put them off the field if
they interfere with the game. They do nothing but harm, and they do it
by that most subtle and fatal thing of all, that of taking the momentum
and the spirit and the forward dash out of things. A man who is virtuous
and a coward has no marketable virtue about him. The virtue, I repeat,
which is merely self-defensive is not serviceable even, I suspect, to
himself. For how a man can swallow and not taste bad when he is a coward
and thinking only of himself I cannot imagine.

Be militant! Be an organization that is going to do things! If you can
find older men who will give you cou