fear and trembling with
which he is commanded to work out his salvation?

Yet, this buoyancy and light-heartedness are legitimate feelings. They
spring up, like wild-flowers, from the very nature of man. God intends
that prismatic hues and auroral lights shall flood our morning sky. He
must be filled with a sour and rancid misanthropy, who cannot bless the
Creator that there is one part of man's sinful and cursed life which
reminds of the time, and the state, when there was no sin and no curse.
There is, then, to be no extermination of this legitimate experience.
But there is to be its moderation and its regulation.

And this we get, by the introduction of the feeling and the principle of
religious fear. The youth ought to seek an impression from things unseen
and eternal. God, and His august attributes; Christ, and His awful
Passion; heaven, with its sacred scenes and joys; hell, with its just woe
and wail,--all these should come in, to modify, and temper, the jubilance
that without them becomes the riot of the soul. For this, we apprehend,
is the meaning of our Lord, when He says, "I will forewarn you whom ye
shall fear: Fear him, which after he hath killed hath power to cast into
hell; yea, I say unto you, Fear him." It is not so much any particular
species of fear that we are shut up to, by these words, as it is the
general habit and feeling. The fear of _hell_ is indeed specified,--and
this proves that such a fear is rational and proper in its own
place,--but our Lord would not have us stop with this single and isolated
form of the feeling. He recommends a solemn temper. He commands
a being who stands continually upon the brink of eternity and immensity,
to be aware of his position. He would have the great shadow of eternity
thrown in upon time. He desires that every man should realize, in those
very moments when the sun shines the brightest and the earth looks the
fairest, that there is another world than this, for which man is not
naturally prepared, and for which he must make a preparation. And what He
enjoins upon mankind at large, He specially enjoins upon youth. They need
to be sobered more than others. The ordinary cares of this life, which do
so much towards moderating our desires and aspirations, have not yet
pressed upon the ardent and expectant soul, and therefore it needs, more
than others, to fear and to "stand in awe."

II. Secondly, youth is _elastic, and readily recovers from undue
depression_. Th