451. Words with Young Men

Words with Young Men

Those six young men, I suppose, represent innumerable young men who are about undertaking the battle of life, and who have more interrogation points in their mind than any printer’92s case ever contained, or printer’92s fingers ever set up. But few people who have passed fifty years of age are capable of giving advice to young men. Too many begin their counsel by forgetting they ever were young men themselves. November snows do not understand May-time blossom week. The east wind never did understand the south wind, autumnal golden-rod makes a poor fist at lecturing about early violets. Generally, after a man has rheumatism in his right foot, he is not competent to discuss juvenile elasticity. Not one man out of a hundred can enlist and keep the attention of the young after there is a bald spot on the cranium. I attended a large meeting in Philadelphia, assembled to discuss how the Young Men’92s Christian Association of that city might be made more attractive for young people, when a man arose and made some suggestions with such lugubrious tone of voice, and a manner that seemed to deplore that everything was going to ruin, that an old friend of mine, at seventy-five years as young in feeling as any one at twenty, arose and said: ’93That good brother who has just addressed you will excuse me for saying that a young man would no sooner go and spend an evening among such funereal tones of voice and funereal ideas of religion which that brother seems to have adopted, than he would go and spend the evening in Laurel Hill Cemetery.’94 And yet these young men of Ohio, and all young men, have a right to ask those who have had many opportunities of studying this world and the next world, to give helpful suggestion as to what theories of life one ought to adopt, and what dangers he ought to shun. Attention, young men!

First: Get your soul right. You see, that is the most valuable part of you. It is the most important room in your house. It is the parlor of your entire nature. Put the best pictures on its walls. Put the best music under its arches. It is important to have the kitchen right and the dining-room right and the cellar right and all the other rooms of your nature right; but, oh! the parlor of the soul! Be particular about the guests who enter it. Shut its doors in the faces of those who would despoil and pollute it. There are princes and kings who would like to come into it, while there are assassins who would like to come out from behind its curtains, and with silent foot attempt deeds desperate and murderous. Let the King come in. He is now at the door. Let me be usher to announce his arrival, and introduce the King of this world, the King of all worlds, the King eternal, immortal, invisible. Make room. Stand back. Clear the way. Bow, kneel, worship the King. Have him once for your guest, and it does not make much difference who comes or goes. Would you have a warranty against moral disaster, and surety of a noble career? Read at least one chapter of the Bible on your knees every day of your life.

Word the next: Have your body right. ’93How are you?’94 I say when I meet a friend of mine on the street. He is over seventy, and alert and vigorous, and very prominent in the law. His answer is: ’93I am living on the capital of a well-spent youth.’94 On the contrary, there are hundreds of thousands of good people who are suffering the results of early sins. The grace of God gives one a new heart, but not a new body. David, the Psalmist, had to cry out: ’93Remember not the sins of my youth.’94 Let a young man make his body a wine-closet, or a rum jug, or a whisky cask, or a beer barrel, and smoke poisoned cigarettes until his hand trembles, and he is black under the eyes, and his cheeks fall in, and then at some church seek and find religion; yet, all the praying he can do will not hinder the physical consequences of natural law violated. You six young men of Ohio, and all young men, take care of your eyes, those windows of the soul. Take care of your ears, and listen to nothing that depraves. Take care of your lips, and see that they utter no profanities. Take care of your nerves by enough sleep and avoiding unhealthy excitements, and by taking outdoor exercise, whether by ball or skate or horseback, lawn-tennis or exhilarating bicycle, if you sit upright and do not join that throng of several hundred thousands who by the wheel are cultivating crooked backs and cramped chests and deformed bodies, rapidly coming down toward all-fours and the attitude of the beasts that perish. Anything that bends body, mind or soul to the earth is unhealthy. Oh, it is a grand thing to be well, but do not depend on pharmacy and the doctors to make you well. Stay well. Read John Todd’92s Manual, and Combe’92s Physiology, and everything you can lay your hands on about mastication and digestion and assimilation. Where you find one healthy man or woman, you find fifty half dead. From my own experience I can testify that, being a disciple of the gymnasium, many a time just before going to the parallel bars and punching bags and pulleys and weights, I thought Satan was about taking possession of society and the Church and the world, but after one hour of climbing and lifting and pulling, I felt like hastening home so as to be there when the millennium set in. Take a good stout run every day. I find in that habit, which I have kept up since at eighteen years I read the aforesaid Todd’92s Manual, more recuperation than in anything else. Those six men of Ohio will need all possible nerve and all possible eyesight and all possible muscular development before they get through the terrific struggle of this life.

Word the next: Take care of your intellect. Here comes the flood of novelettes, ninety-nine out of a hundred belittling to every one that opens them. Here come depraved newspapers, submerging good and elevated American journalism. Here comes a whole perdition of printed abomination, dumped on the breakfast-table, and tea-table, and parlor-table. Take at least one good newspaper with able editorial and reporters’92 columns, mostly occupied with helpful intelligence, announcing marriages and deaths and reformatory and religious assemblages and charities bestowed and the doings of good people, and giving but little place to nasty divorce cases, and stories of crime, which, like cobras, sting those that touch them. Oh, for more newspapers that put virtue in what is called great primer type, and vice in nonpareil or agate! You have all seen the photographer’92s negative. He took a picture from it ten or twenty years ago. You ask him now for a picture from that same negative. He opens the great chest containing the negatives of 1885, or 1875, and he reproduces the picture. Young men, your memory is made up of the negatives of an immortal photography. All that you see or hear goes into your soul to make pictures for the future. You will have with you till the Judgment Day the negatives of all the bad pictures you have ever looked at, and of all the debauched scenes you have read about. Show me the newspapers you take and the books you read, and I will tell you what are your prospects for well-being in this life, and what will be your residence a million years after the planet on which we now live shall have dropped out of the universe. I never travel on Sunday unless it be a case of necessity or mercy. But one autumn I was in India in a city plague-struck. By the hundreds the people were down with fearful illness. We went to the apothecary’92s to get some preventive of the fever, and the place was crowded with invalids, and we had no confidence in the preventive we purchased from the Hindus. The mail train was to start Sabbath evening. I said, ’93Frank, I think the Lord will excuse us if we get out of this place with the first train;’94 and we took it, not feeling quite comfortable till we were hundreds of miles away. I felt we were right in flying from the plague. Well, the air in many of our cities is struck through with a worse plague’97the plague of corrupt and pernicious literature. Get away from it as soon as possible. It has already ruined the bodies, minds and souls of a multitude which, if stood in solid column, would reach from New York Battery to Golden Horn. The plague! The plague!

Word the next: Never go to any place where you would be ashamed to die. Adopt that plan, and you will never go to any evil amusement, nor be found in compromising surroundings. How many startling cases within the past few years of men called suddenly out of this world, and the newspapers surprised us when they mentioned the locality and the companionship. To put it on the least important ground, you ought not to go to any such forbidden place, because if you depart this life in such circumstances, you put officiating ministers in great embarrassment. You know that some of the ministers believe that all who leave this life go straight to heaven, however they have acted in this world, or whatever they have believed. To get you through from such surroundings is an appalling theological undertaking. One of the most arduous and besweating efforts of that kind that I ever knew of was at the obsequies of a man who was found dead in a snow bank with his rum-jug close beside him. But the minister did the work of happy transference as well as possible, although it did seem a little inappropriate when he read, ’93Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord. They rest from their labors, and their works do follow them.’94 If you have no mercy upon yourself, have mercy upon the minister who may be called to officiate after your demise. Die at home, or in some place of honest business, or where the laughter is clean, or amid companionships pure and elevating. Remember that any place we go to may become our starting-point for the next world. When we enter the harbor of Heaven, and the Officer of Light comes aboard, let us be able to show that our clearing papers were dated at the right port.

Word the next: As soon as you can, by industry and economy, have a home of your own. What do I mean by a home? I mean two rooms and the blessing of God on both of them; one room for slumber, one for food, its preparation and the partaking thereof. Mark you, I would like you to have a home with thirty rooms, all upholstered, pictured and statuetted, but I am putting it down at the minimum. A husband and wife who cannot be happy with a home made up of two rooms would not be happy in heaven if they got there. He who wins and keeps the affection of a good practical woman has done gloriously. What do I mean by a good woman? I mean one who loved God before she loved you. What do I mean by a practical woman? I mean one who can help you to earn a living, for a time comes in almost every man’92s life when he is flung of hard misfortune, and you do not want a weakling going around the house whining and sniffling about how she had it before you married her. The simple reason why thousands of men never get on in the world is because they married nonentities and never got over it. The only thing that Job’92s wife proposed for his boils was a warm poultice of profanity, saying, ’93Curse God and die.’94 When a man marries, he marries for heaven or hell, and it is more so when a woman marries. You six young men in Fayette, Ohio, had better look out.

Word the next: Do not rate yourself too high. Better rate yourself too low. If you rate yourself too low, the world will say, ’93Come up.’94 If you rate yourself too high, the world will say, ’93Come down.’94 It is a bad thing when a man gets so exaggerated an idea of himself as did the Earl of Buchan, whose speech Ballantyne, the Edinburgh printer, could not set up for publication because he had not enough capital I’92s among his type. Remember that the world got along without you nearly six thousand years before you were born, and unless some meteor collides with us, or some internal explosion occurs, the world will probably last several thousand years after you are dead.

Word the next: Do not postpone too long doing something decided for God, humanity and yourself. The greatest things have been done before forty years of age. Pascal at sixteen years of age; Grotius at seventeen; Romulus at twenty; Pitt at twenty-two; Whitefield at twenty-four; Bonaparte at twenty-seven; Ignatius Loyola at thirty; Raphael at thirty-seven, had made the world feel their virtue or their vice, and the biggest strokes you will probably make for the truth or against the truth will be before you reach the meridian of life. Do not wait for something to turn up. Go to work and turn it up. There is no such thing as good luck. No man that ever lived has had a better time than I have had; yet I never had any good luck. But instead thereof, a kind Providence has crowded my life with mercies. You will never accomplish much as long as you go at your work on the minute you are expected, and stop at the first minute it is lawful to quit. The greatly useful and successful men of the next century will be those who began half an hour before they were required, and worked at least half an hour after they might have quit. Unless you are willing sometimes to work twelve hours of the day, you will remain on the low levels, and your life will be a prolonged humdrum.

Word the next: Remember that it is only a small part of our life that we are to pass on earth. Less than your finger nail compared with your whole body is the life on earth when compared with the next life. I suppose there are not more than half a dozen people in this world a hundred years old. But a very few people in any country reach eighty. The majority of the human race expire before thirty. Now, what an equipoise in such a consideration. If things go wrong, it is only for a little while. Have you not enough moral pluck to stand the jostling, and the injustices, and the mishaps of the small parenthesis between the two eternities? It is a good thing to get ready for the one mile this side the marble slab, but more important to get fixed up for the interminable miles which stretch out into the distances beyond the marble slab. A few years ago on the Nashville and New Orleans Railroad we were waked up early in the morning and told we must take carriages for some distance. ’93Why?’94 we all asked. But we soon saw for ourselves that while the first four or five spans of the bridge were up, further on there was a span that had fallen, and we could not but shudder at what might have been the possibilities. When your rail-train starts on a long bridge you want to be sure that the first span of the bridge is all right, but what if further on there is a span of the bridge that is all wrong; how then? what then? In one of the Western cities the freshets had carried away a bridge, and a man knew that the express train would soon come along. So he lighted a lantern and started up the track to stop the train. But before he had got far enough up the track the wind blew out the light of his lantern, and standing in the darkness as the train came up, he threw the lantern into the locomotive, crying, Stop! Stop! and the warning was in time to halt the train. And if any of you by evil habits are hastening on toward brink or precipice or fallen span, I throw this Gospel lantern at your mad career: Stop! Stop! The end thereof is death!

Young man, you are caged now by many environments, but you will after a while get your wings out. Some one caged a Rocky Mountain eagle and kept him shut up between the wires until all the spirit and courage had gone out of it. Released one day from the cage, the eagle seemed to want to return to its former prison. The fact was that the eagle had all gone out of him. He kept his wings down. But after a while he looked up at the sun, turning his head first this side and then that side, and then spread one wing and then the other wing, and began to mount, until the hills were far under his feet, and he was out of sight in the empyrean. My brother, when you leave this life, if by the grace of God you are prepared, you will come out of the cage of this hindering mortality, and looking up to the heavenly heights you will spread wing for immortal flight, leaving sun and moon and stars beneath in your ascent to glories that never fade and splendors which never die. Your body is the cage. Your soul is the eagle.

Word the next: Fill yourself with biographies of men who did gloriously in the business or occupation or profession you are about to choose or have already chosen. Going to be a merchant? Read up Peter Cooper and Abbot Lawrence and James Lenox and William E. Dodge and George Peabody. See how most of the merchants at the start munched their noonday luncheon made up of dry bread and a hunk of cheese, behind a counter or in a storeroom, as they started in a business which brought them to the top of influences which enabled them to bless the world with millions of dollars consecrated to hospitals and schools and churches and private benefactions, where neither right hand nor left hand knew what the other hand did. Going to be a physician? Read up Harvey and Gross and Sir Adam Clarke, and James Y. Simpson, the discoverer of chloroform as an an’e6sthetic; and all the other mighty physicians who have mended broken bones, and enthroned again deposed intellects, and given their lives to healing the long, deep gash of the world’92s agony. Going to be a mechanic? Read up the inventors of sewing-machines and cotton gins and life-saving apparatus; and the men who as architects and builders and manufacturers and day laborers have made a life of thirty years in this century worth more than the full one hundred years of any other century. You six young men of Ohio, and all the other young men’97instead of wasting your time on dry essays as to how to do great things, go to the biographical alcove of your village or city library and acquaint yourselves with men who in the sight of earth and heaven and hell did the great things. Remember, the greatest things are yet to be done. If the Bible be true, or as I had better put it, since the Bible is beyond all controversy true, the greatest battle is yet to be fought, and compared with it Saragossa and Gettysburg and Sedan were child’92s play with toy pistols. We even know the name of the battle, though we are not certain as to where it will be fought. I refer to Armageddon. The greatest discoveries are yet to be made. A scientist has recently discovered in the air something which will yet rival electricity. The most of things have not yet been found out. An explorer has recently found in the Valley of the Nile a whole fleet of ships buried ages ago where now there is no water. Only six out of the eight hundred grasses have been turned into food like the potato and the tomato. There are hundreds of other styles of food to be discovered. Aerial navigation will yet be made as safe as travel on the solid earth. Cancers and consumptions and leprosies are to be transferred from the catalogue of incurable diseases to the curable. Medical men are now successfully experimenting with modes of transferring diseases from weak constitutions which cannot throw them off, to stout constitutions which are able to throw them off. Worlds like Mars and the moon will be within hailing distance, and instead of confining our knowledge to their canals and their volcanoes, they will signal all styles of intelligence to us, and we will signal all styles of intelligence to them. Coming times will class our boasted nineteenth century with the dark ages. Under the power of Gospelization the world is going to be so improved that the sword and the rifle of our time will be kept in museums as now we look at thumb-screws and ancient instruments of torture.

Oh, what opportunities you are going to have, young men all the world over, under thirty. How thankful you ought to be that you were not born any sooner. Blessed are the cradles that are being rocked now. Blessed are the students in the freshman class. Blessed those who will yet be young men when the new century comes in, in a few years from now. This world was hardly fit to live in, in the eighteenth century. I do not see how the old folks stood it. During this nineteenth century the world has by Christianizing and educational influences been fixed up until it does very well for temporary residence. But the twentieth century! Ah, that will be the time to see great sights, and do great deeds. Oh, young men, get ready for the rolling in of that mightiest and grandest and most glorious century that the world has ever seen!

I do not know what sort of a December night it will be when this century lies down to die; whether it will be starlit or tempestuous; whether the snows will be drifting, or the soft winds will breathe upon the pillow of the expiring centenarian. But millions will mourn its going, for many have received from it kindnesses innumerable, and they will kiss farewell the aged brow wrinkled with so many vicissitudes. Old nineteenth century of weddings and burials; of defeats and victories; of nations born and nations dead; thy pulses growing feebler now, will soon stop on that thirty-first night of December. But right beside it will be the infant century, held up for baptism. Its smooth brow will glow with bright expectations. The then more than seventeen hundred million inhabitants of the earth will hail its birth and pray for its prosperity. Its reign will be for a hundred years, and the most of your life I think will be under the sway of its scepter. Get ready for it. Have your heart right; your nerves right; your brain right; your digestion right. We will hand over to you our commerce, our mechanism, our arts and sciences, our professions, our pulpits, our inheritance. We believe in you. We trust you. We pray for you. We bless you. And though by the time you get into the thickest of the fight for God and righteousness, we may have disappeared from earthly scenes, we will not lose our interest in your struggle, and if the dear Lord will excuse us for a little while from the Temple Service and the House of Many Mansions, we will come out on the battlements of jasper, and cheer you, and perhaps if that night of this world be very quiet, you may hear our voices dropping from afar, as we cry, ’93Be thou faithful unto death, and thou shalt have a crown!’94

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage