sion in the
margin says: "Take thy part in suffering hardship;" take, that is to
say, your share of the hardship which belongs to the common cause.
"Come in with the rest of us," it means, "in bearing the hard times."
There were plenty of hard times in those days. Paul was a prisoner in
Rome; Nero's persecution was abroad. When the aged Paul, however,
writes to the young man whom he affectionately calls his beloved child,
he does not say to him: "I hope, my beloved child, that you will find
life easier than I have, or that the times will clear up before you
have to take the lead." He says, on the contrary: {45} "The times are
very hard. Come in with us then and take your share of the hardship."

A great many people in the modern world are trying to look at life in
quite an opposite way. They want to make it soft and easy for
themselves and for their sons. The problem of life is to get rid of
hardness. Education is to be smoothed and simplified. Trouble and
care are to be kept away from their beloved children. Young people are
to have a good time while they can. The apostle strikes a wholly
different note. Writing to a young man of the modern time he would
say: "There is a deal of hardship, of poverty, of industrial distress
in the world, and I charge you to take your share in it! Are you not
old enough to enlist in Christ's army? At your age, college men
twenty-five years ago were brigadier-generals, dying at the head of
their troops. Take your place, then, in the modern battle. Be a good
soldier, not a shirk or a runaway."

When that extraordinary man,--perhaps the most inspiring leader of men
in our generation,--General Armstrong, was first undertaking his work
for the negroes in Virginia, he wrote a letter to a friend in the
North, {46} saying: "Dear Miss Ludlow: If you care to sail into a good
hearty battle, where there is no scratching and pin-sticking, but great
guns and heavy shot only used, come here. If you like to lend a hand
when a good cause is short-handed, come here." Could any brave man or
woman resist a call like that? It was a call to arms, a summons to a
good soldier of Jesus Christ. The problem of a soldier is, not to find
a soft and easy place in life, with plenty to get and little to do, but
"to take his share of hardship," and as the passage goes on, "to please
him who hath chosen him to be a soldier."

[1] This change of reading is finely commented on by F. Paget, _The
Ha