locks up so
many lives like a numbing fate--signalize your record by some bit of
heroism. If you would have posterity call you wise, seize your chance,
while you have it, to be God's fool. Find the faith that can help you
to play a man's part in the world; find in your faith the power which
can grasp you by your weakness and sin, and lift you into strength and
achievement. The Church needs you. For of all the institutions in
Christendom the Church is stifled with safety, propriety, and
conventional wisdom. It is the world which seems to monopolize the
sparkle, the daring, and the picturesque. Respect us, your seniors in
years, if we have done anything worthy in the past; but do not let it
influence you unduly if now we seem to you perhaps timid and
conservative. Time will bring most of you to the same place. But
if--which God forbid--you do little after, do at least something now to
redeem your career from impotence or from miserable aims that all end
in selfishness. Find, I say again, on the threshold of your years, the
power that can grasp you by your real requirement. Your first need is
not wisdom, but grace; it is not education, but regeneration; it is not
an ideal even, but a Saviour. Wisdom, education, and moral enthusiasms
are but the machinery of our uplifting, the driving-power is Life. You
know the Source of this power; you know the way to Him of Whom it is
written: "In Him was life; and the life was the light of men." Now is
your accepted time--

"Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute:
What you can do, or dream you can, begin it;
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.
Only engage, and then the mind grows heated;
Begin, and then the work will be completed."

[1] Robert Collyer.

[2] Dr. Maclaren.

[3] Dr. Lyman Abbot.

THE WORSHIP OF LUCK

"The lot is cast into the lap; but the whole disposing thereof is of
the Lord."--Proverbs xvi. 33.

III

THE WORSHIP OF LUCK

It is reported that Prince Bismarck once and again attributed some of
the most remarkable successes he had won in diplomacy to the
circumstance that he had used truth as one of his greatest resources.
Well aware of the fact that truth, for its own sake, was not the first
thing that was expected from him, the use of truth gave him the
tactical advantage of knowing how almost inevitably the opposite
diplomacy would interpret it. He told the truth in order that it might
be acted upon as some