it is paid for: they smile and laugh without a suspicion of the anxious
thoughts of day and night which a parent bears to enable them to smile.
So to speak, they are sleeping--and it is not a guilty sleep--while
another watches.

My young brethren--youth is one of the precious opportunities of
life--rich in blessing if you choose to make it so; but having in it the
materials of undying remorse if you suffer it to pass unimproved. Your
quiet Gethsemane is now. Do you know how you can imitate the apostles in
their fatal sleep? You can suffer your young days to pass idly and
uselessly away; you can live as if you had nothing to do but to enjoy
yourselves: you can let others think for you, and not try to become
thoughtful yourselves: till the business and difficulties of life come
upon you unprepared, and you find yourselves like men waking from sleep,
hurried, confused, scarcely able to stand, with all the faculties
bewildered, not knowing right from wrong, led headlong to evil, just
because you have not given yourselves in time to learn what is good. All
that is sleep.

And now let us mark it. You cannot repair that in after-life. Oh!
remember every period of human life has its own lesson, and you cannot
learn that lesson in the next period. The boy has one set of lessons to
learn, and the young man another, and the grown-up man another. Let us
consider one single instance. The boy has to learn docility, gentleness
of temper, reverence, submission. All those feelings which are to be
transferred afterwards in full cultivation to God, like plants nursed in
a hotbed and then planted out, are to be cultivated first in youth.
Afterwards, those habits which have been merely habits of obedience to
an earthly parent, are to become religious submission to a heavenly
parent. Our parents stand to us in the place of God. Veneration for our
parents is intended to become afterwards adoration for something higher.
Take that single instance; and now suppose that _that_ is not learned in
boyhood. Suppose that the boy sleeps to the duty of veneration, and
learns only flippancy, insubordination, and the habit of deceiving his
father,--can that, my young brethren, be repaired afterwards? Humanly
speaking not. Life is like the transition from class to class in a
school. The school-boy who has not learned arithmetic in the earlier
classes, cannot secure it when he comes to mechanics in the higher: each
section has its own sufficient work. He