d by the truth that ideas are realities, and that scepticism
about high principles is the most destructive form of ignorance.

We want young men of vision in business. Not cranks, not men who are
responsible for their own failure in whatsoever their hand findeth to
do; but men who see that the institution of business is God's present
plan for distributing wealth, comfort, and intelligence. We want men
in law who shall realize that the function of the legal profession is
to build up justice and ensphere it in the will of the people. We want
men in politics who have a clear conception of what the kingdom of God
is, who recognize that the work of legislation and legislators is to
think and speak and act for the interests of that kingdom--in the
spirit and on the basis of Divine Fatherhood and human brotherhood.
And in the pulpit we want men who have in them the vision of an Isaiah,
a Paul, a John, and a Luther; men who shall make themselves felt as
perennial gifts to their day--to tell us what we can do and what we
ought to do, to lift up a voice for the eternally true, amid the
clamour of self-interest and cries of craven fear.

"The world needs nothing more; the great English-speaking race has no
need comparable with this need of men who can carry the spirit of
vision, which is really the power of achievement, into every phase of
our individual and collective life." [3]

Many of you represent great possibilities. You are, or you ought to
be, at the flow-tide of an untainted enthusiasm. Your life should be a
moral heat, which radiates in ever-enlarging circles of hope and
service. But there are fires which, once they are allowed to slow
down, can never be rekindled. There are large and generous beliefs at
twenty-five years of age which, unless we cultivate and keep ourselves
in the love of them, thin out like wasting magic, and no necromancy can
ever conjure them back again. You young men have potencies of hope and
enthusiasm which, if denied expression, strike inwardly and corrupt the
source out of which they came.

And now, I repeat, is the time when you can give a true man's best
hostages to the future. Now is the time to make the most of your
strategic places in life. Almost before you know it, your power to
determine many things will have merged into obligations that not one
man in fifty is free to disregard. While it is called your day--before
you are compassed behind and before with a commonplace that