eir holiday than
use it advantageously. But just as far as this trouble extends, so far
it shows, not the harm of leisure, but the sore straits we have been
brought to for lack of it. There is no sadder result of the disuse of a
faculty than the decadence of that faculty. Time is the essential gift
of God to man,--essential not merely to providing for his physical
wants, but to forming his character, to developing his powers, to
cultivating his taste, to elevating his life. Is it, then, that he has
devoted so disproportionate a share of that time to one of its uses, and
that not the noblest, that he has lost the desire and the ability to
devote any of it to its higher uses? Have young men given themselves to
buying and selling till they have no interest in books, in Nature, in
Art, in manly sport and exercise? Then surely it behooves us at once to
change all this. No man can have a well-balanced mind, a good judgment,
who is interested in nothing but his business. If, when released from
that for a half-day each week, he is listless, aimless, discontented, it
is a sure sign that undue devotion to it has corroded his powers, and is
making havoc of his finer organization.

It is to be feared that many of our young men do not know what
recreation means. They confound it with riot. Fierce driving, hard
drinking, violence, and vice they understand; but with quiet, refining,
soothing, and strengthening diversions they have small acquaintance.
This is very largely the fault of the community in which they live. Do
Christian families in our large cities feel the obligations which they
are under towards the young men who come among them? I believe that a
very large part of the immorality, the irreligion, the skepticism and
crime into which young men fall is due to their being so coldly and
cruelly let alone by Christian families. A boy comes up from the
country, where every one knows him and greets him, into the solitude of
the great city. He has left home behind him, and finds no new home to
receive him. When he is released from his work in shop or counting-room,
nothing more inviting awaits him than the silent room in the dreary
boarding-house. He misses suddenly, and at a most sensitive age, the
graces and unthinking kindnesses of home, the thousand little teasings
and pettings, the common interests, and tendernesses, that he never
thought of till he lost them. He is surrounded by men and boys all bent
on their several ways. He