erfoot in the mire? What
shall he give in exchange for his own soul, or any other man's soul? And
since the world, the world of affairs, the world of society, is nothing
less and nothing more than all of us put together, it is a great
enterprise for the salvation of the soul in this world as well as in the
next. There is a text in Scripture that has always interested me
profoundly. It says godliness is profitable in this life as well as in
the life that is to come; and if you do not start it in this life, it
will not reach the life that is to come. Your measurements, your
directions, your whole momentum, have to be established before you reach
the next world. This world is intended as the place in which we shall
show that we know how to grow in the stature of manliness and of
righteousness.

I have come here to bid Godspeed to the great work of the Young Men's
Christian Association. I love to think of the gathering force of such
things as this in the generations to come. If a man had to measure the
accomplishments of society, the progress of reform, the speed of the
world's betterment, by the few little things that happened in his own
life, by the trifling things that he can contribute to accomplish, he
would indeed feel that the cost was much greater than the result. But no
man can look at the past of the history of this world without seeing a
vision of the future of the history of this world; and when you think of
the accumulated moral forces that have made one age better than another
age in the progress of mankind, then you can open your eyes to the
vision. You can see that age by age, though with a blind struggle in the
dust of the road, though often mistaking the path and losing its way in
the mire, mankind is yet--sometimes with bloody hands and battered
knees--nevertheless struggling step after step up the slow stages to the
day when he shall live in the full light which shines upon the uplands,
where all the light that illumines mankind shines direct from the face
of God.

[E] In the _Areopagitica_: "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered
virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her
adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to
be run for, not without dust and heat."

[F] Sir George Williams, 1821-1905, an English philanthropist, founder
of the Young Men's Christian Association.

ANNUAL ADDRESS TO CONGRESS

[Delivered at a joint session of the