in a careless half hour of thoughtless sport.
You do not find the man binding up a lifetime of effort into a moral
unit by an all-inclusive and dominant intention. He was never ready to
work and to keep on working until achievement of a worthy sort should
crown his effort.

You cannot drive a long nail in to the head by hammering around all
over the board. You must hit the nail on the head and keep on hitting
it on the head until you have sent it home. You cannot sink the shaft
of a mine by digging all around over the mountainside. You must dig in
one place and keep on digging in one place persistently until you have
sunk your shaft to the vein of ore. You cannot build a life that is
worthy to be the life of a child of God unless you gird yourself for
that persistent effort which lies between you and the goal upon which
you have set your heart. It cannot be done in an hour, or in a day, or
in a year. The hard task of presenting to Him a life which will bear
His own eye and win His approval will mortgage the best strength of all
your best years.

You may have the body of an athlete. You may have a mind with splendid
capacity in it for real achievement. You may have a heart which reacts
as promptly as gunpowder when a spark of genuine aspiration is applied
to it. You may have all these--I hope you have--but unless you have
learned the high art of staying by, of holding on, of keeping at it no
matter what comes, you are doomed to defeat.

How often you see a young man of generous impulse, of kindly
disposition, like Esau, faltering and failing as the years come and go
until at last he is little better than a vagabond upon the face of the
earth. How often you find a man of purpose and persistence, like
Jacob, with many an unfortunate trait in him, with a heavy moral
handicap to overcome, finally winning out by the sheer force of his
spiritual tenacity. "Be thou faithful unto death," the promise has it,
"and I will give thee the crown of life." The crown is held in reserve
for those who persist clear through to the end.

This young man failed because he lacked the favour of God. In the
early stages of his career we read of a divine element in his life.
"The woman bare a son and called his name Samson, and the Lord blessed
him. And the spirit of the Lord came mightily upon him" for those
deeds of valour.

However we may interpret these expressions the fact is plain that so
long as he kept his life clean a