And some of you young men, away from the
restraints of home, and in a city, where you think nobody could see you
sowing your wild oats, have got entangled with them. I beseech you, cast
out all this filth, and all this meanness and pettiness from your
habitual thinkings, and let the august and the lovely and the pure and
the true come in instead. You have the cup in your hand, you can either
press into it clusters of ripe grapes, and make mellow wine, or you can
squeeze into it wormwood and gall and hemlock and poison-berries; and,
as you brew, you have to drink. You have the canvas, and you are to
cover it with the figures that you like best. You can either do as Fra
Angelico did, who painted the white walls of every cell in his quiet
convent with Madonnas and angels and risen Christs, or you can do like
some of those low-toned Dutch painters, who never can get above a brass
pan and a carrot, and ugly boors and women, and fill the canvas with
vulgarities and deformities. Choose which you will have to keep you
company.

II. Now, let me ask you to think for a moment _why_ this counsel is
pressed upon you.

Let me put the reasons very briefly. They are, first, because thought
moulds action. 'As a man thinketh in his heart so is he.' One looks
round the world, and all these solid-seeming realities of institutions,
buildings, governments, inventions and machines, steamships and electric
telegrams, laws and governments, palaces and fortresses, they are all
but embodied thoughts. There was a thought at the back of each of them
which took shape. So, in another sense than the one in which the saying
was originally meant, but yet an august and solemn sense, 'the word is
made flesh,' and our thoughts became visible, and stand round us, a
ghastly company. Sooner or later what has been the drift and trend of a
man's life comes out, flashes out sometimes, and dribbles out at other
times, into visibility in his actions; and, just as the thunder follows
on the swift passage of the lightning, so my acts are neither more nor
less than the reverberation and after-clap of my thoughts.

So if you are entertaining in your hearts and minds this august company
of which my text speaks, your lives will be fair and beautiful. For what
does the Apostle immediately go on to add to our text? 'These things
do'--as you certainly will if you think about them, and as you certainly
will not unless you do.

Again, thought and work make character. We