"because ye are _strong_." We propose to urge upon
the young, the duty of cultivating the fear of God's displeasure, because
they are able to endure the emotion; because youth is the springtide and
prime of human life, and capable of carrying burdens, and standing up
under influences and impressions, that might crush a feebler period, or a
more exhausted stage of the human soul.

I. In the first place, the emotion of fear ought to enter into the
consciousness of the young, because _youth is naturally light-hearted_.
"Childhood and youth," saith the Preacher, "are vanity." The opening
period in human life is the happiest part of it, if we have respect
merely to the condition and circumstances in which the human being is
placed. He is free from all public cares, and responsibilities. He is
encircled within the strong arms of parents, and protectors. Even if he
tries, he cannot feel the pressure of those toils and anxieties which
will come of themselves, when he has passed the line that separates youth
from manhood. When he hears his elders discourse of the weight, and the
weariness, of this working-day world, it is with incredulity and
surprise. The world is bright before his eye, and he wonders that it
should ever wear any other aspect. He cannot understand how the
freshness, and vividness, and pomp of human life, should shift into its
soberer and sterner forms; and he will not, until the

"Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy."[2]

Now there is something, in this happy attitude of things, to fill the
heart of youth with gayety and abandonment. His pulses beat strong and
high. The currents of his soul flow like the mountain river. His mood is
buoyant and jubilant, and he flings himself with zest, and a sense of
vitality, into the joy and exhilaration all around him. But such a mood
as this, unbalanced and untempered by a loftier one, is hazardous to the
eternal interests of the soul. Perpetuate this gay festal abandonment
of the mind; let the human being, through the whole of his earthly
course, be filled with the sole single consciousness that _this_ is the
beautiful world; and will he, can he, live as a stranger and a pilgrim
in it? Perpetuate that vigorous pulse, and that youthful blood which
"runs tickling up and down the veins;" drive off, and preclude, all that
care and responsibility which renders human life so earnest; and will the
young immortal go through it, with that sacred