finish they are on the winning
side.

Here in this company there may be many a favourite son. You are
inexpressibly dear to the hearts of those parents. Their thoughts,
their prayers and their efforts are all reaching out for the best
things for you. They do not know and you do not know what hard tests
may lie ahead. You too may be sent for thirteen long years to the
school of adversity, but if the spirit of God is in your heart, if you
have faith, a vital and personal faith in Jesus Christ, if you have
caught the vision of what life may be made to mean at its best, then it
lies within your power also to achieve.

II

The Young Man Who Was an Athlete

What a roomy place the Bible is! It is not filled up with model men
and women. It is not filled up with nice little boys and girls, all
neat and sweet, good enough to be angels right off with no alterations.
It is peopled with imperfect, blundering folk like ourselves.

Some of these samples of human life are offered to us for our
imitation, and some by way of warning. The wide variety exhibited
shows how God can use and bless the better elements in many a life
where the wheat and the tares grow together until the harvest. The
divine purpose shows an amazing measure of hospitality. "The love of
God is broader than the measure of man's mind."

We come for example to the eleventh chapter of Hebrews. It is the roll
call of men of faith. "By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent
sacrifice than Cain." By faith Enoch was translated that he should not
see death because he walked with God. By faith Noah built an ark for
the saving of his house. By faith Abraham went out to found a nation
in which all the nations of the earth should be blessed, not knowing
whither he went. "By faith Moses chose rather to suffer affliction
with the people of God than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season."

"And what shall I say more," the author remarks in passing. "Time
would fail me to tell of all the men who by faith subdued kingdoms and
wrought righteousness, obtained promises and put to flight the armies
of evil, Gideon and Barak, Samson and Jephthah."

Samson! The very presence of his name in this catalogue of moral
heroes all but takes away one's breath. What does this big husky
fellow, this wild, fun-loving chap have to do with the working out of
the divine purpose for the race? We are as much surprised as we would
be if we had found Jack John