of
worldliness, to essay, for the first time, to force our way into the
kingdom of heaven. Old age is not the season for contest and victory;
nor shall we then be so able to escape unharmed from the temptations of
life as to stand before the Son of Man.

These are the things which will come to pass for us and for you. But for
you there is much more to come, which to us is not future now, but past
or present. With you, for a time, it will be all a course forwards and
upwards. From the preparation for life, you will come to the reality;
from a state of less importance, you will be passing on to one of
greater. Your temptations, whatever they may be now, will not certainly
become weaker. As outward restraint is more and more taken off from you,
so your need of inward restraint will be greater. Will those who are
extravagant now on a small scale, be less extravagant on a large scale?
Will those who are selfish now, become less selfish amidst a wider field
of enjoyment? Will those who know not or care not for Christ, while yet,
as it were, standing quietly on the shore, be led to think of him more
amidst the excitement of the first setting sail, amidst the interest of
the first newly-seen country?

You know not yet, nor can know, the immense importance of that period of
life on which many of you are entering, or have just entered. You are
coming, or come, to what may be called the second beginning of life: to
which, in the common course of things, there will succeed no third.
Ignorance, absence of temptation, the presence of all good impressions,
constitute much of the innocence of mere childhood,--so beautiful while
it lasts, so sure to be soon blighted! It is blighted in the first
experience of life, most commonly when a boy first goes to school. Then
his mere innocence, which indeed he may be said to have worn rather
instinctively than by choice, becomes grievously polluted. Then come the
hardness, the coarseness, the intense selfishness; sometimes, too, the
falsehood, the cruelty, the folly of the boy: then comes that period, so
trying to the faith of parents, when all their early care seems blasted;
when the vineyard, which they had fenced so tenderly, seems all
despoiled and trodden under foot. It is indeed a discouraging season,
the exact image of the ungenial springs of our natural year. But after
this there comes, as it were, a second beginning of life, when principle
takes the place of innocence. There is a time,