S. THE CHOICE YOUNG MAN.

THE CHOICE YOUNG MAN.

Saul, a choice young man. — 1 Samuel 9:2.

Saul is as true a character of the Old Testament as his namesake, who is by and by called Paul, is of the New. He is full of the spirit of the morning. He is eager and incomplete. He attracts and disappoints us. He is a mixture of loyalty and disobedience. He excites great hopes, and dies in tragical failure. He makes ready the way for something better than himself. He is the true Old Testament man. But it is not of him that I want to speak to-day. It is simply of that striking phrase in which he is described. "A choice young man," so he is called. It is the general description of a being in whom we are all interested, who is supremely interested in himself, and yet who has an element of mystery, and excites our curiosity as well as our interest. Let us ask ourselves this morning what are the characteristics of the choice young man. The "choice" of anything signifies the best example of that thing. The word involves the idea not of exceptionalness but of representativeness. The choice fruit of the tree is the tree’s best fruit; it is that in which the tree’s juices have had their most unhindered way, and made the best which that tree was capable of making. The choice work of art is the freest embodiment of the artistic spirit, the thing in which beautiful thought and beautiful work and beautiful material have done their best. The choice man is the best specimen of humanity, the human being in whom there is least that is inhuman or unhuman, and in whom the truly human qualities are most complete. In every case there is a ruling out of what is exceptional, and a fulfilling of what is essential. The choice thing is the true thing. So is it with the choice young man. He is the true young man. He is the human creature in whom the best material of the world, which is manhood, exists in its best condition, which is youth; or if I am wrong in calling youth the best condition, at least it is a condition which has excellences and fascinations which are wholly its own. The great point of the phrase is this, — that it denotes not an exception but a true condition of human life. The choice young man is the man in whom are uttered the normal characteristics of young manhood; and so he invites our study, not as a strange phenomenon, but as a revelation in peculiarly perfect, and therefore peculiarly distinct, display of a nature with which we are familiar, and which we everywhere desire to understand. The charm of young human life is felt everywhere, and through all special conditions which give it its variety of local color. It belongs to no nation and no age. The young Roman, the young Greek, the young Arab, the young Englishman, the young American, as well as the young Jew, excite at once the imagination and the admiration of the world. Indeed in the freshness of life is felt the unity of life; and youth is one throughout the world and throughout history as older life never is. And it would seem to be man’s pure delight in his humanity which, previous to all analysis or careful enumeration of the qualities which make it beautiful, compels from all mankind a glory and delight in the young of its own kind. "Here is pure man," he says, "unmixed, untainted. It is crude indeed, it is unfinished; but that is man, that is his glory. The finished man is not man. It is a contradiction of terms." And so before we ask ourselves what it is that is admirable about him, we admire and are inspired by the young man as we admire and are inspired by the morning and the spring-time.

When, however, we go on, as we must, to ask, beyond this general consciousness of admiration, what it is which we admire in young manhood, our answer must be found, I think, in the way in which the true human life always begins with its circumference, as it were, complete, and then fills in its space with its details. It starts with large conceptions, great desires, enthusiastic notions of what man may be, and it is the fact of these, suggested by and present in the young man’s life, which makes the immediate attraction of a generous young manhood.

It might have been just the opposite. Life might have been made to begin with some one point and slowly widen out from that point until its completeness were attained. Prudently adding one well-tried conception to another, making successive unexpected discoveries about itself, the nature might have only come by slow degrees to realize its own greatness and mysterious dignity. As it is, it leaps at once to this completeness of itself; it is exuberant at the beginning; it does not distrust the world and only gradually learn that the world is worthy of its trust; it trusts the world outright, and lets all stingy questionings come afterward. Life seems so good that it is satisfied with its own normal exercises and emotions, and does not seek additions in artificial stimulants. It bears everlasting witness that the good is deepest and most original in human life, by believing in it first, and only slowly recognizing the presence and power of the evil.

Now here is a distinct quality in human youth, belonging to a distinct truth concerning the life of man. If it is so, then we have reached our first idea about the choice young man. In him this quality of human youth will be most bright and clear. He will be most possessed with the sense of the sufficiency of life, and most eager to preserve its purity because of the completeness which he feels in it. This is the true motive of the best young man’s desire for purity. It is not fear. The wise men gather round him and say, "You must not sin. You must not be licentious; you will suffer if you do. You must restrain your passions; you will suffer if you do not." It is good for him to hear their voices; it is good for him in his weaker moments to be told how God has emphasized the good of every goodness by the penalty which he has attached to every wickedness. But alas for every young man if these fears are the safeguards upon which his soul habitually and finally relies to keep him pure. There is nothing choice about a virtue such as that. Alas for you, young men, if there is no such conception in you of the essential sacredness of life as shall make every natural process and experience beautiful, and just in proportion shall make every unnatural action first of all an impossibility, and then, when in some baser moment it seems possible, make it a horror. This is the young man’s true purity, — first, a divine unconsciousness and incapacity; and then, when that is no longer possible, a divine hate of impurity. How absolutely such a truth quarrels with all the abominable doctrines which would make us believe that a youth must wade its filthy way through the depths of iniquity up to the heights of a wasted and withered continence! Not so; life, the true life, the choice life, begins upon the mountains. As the morning mists scatter, it sees the gulfs it did not see at first; but it has no natural necessity to plunge into them when they are seen. And the true power of its continence is not the horror of the gulf, but the abundance and glory of the pure hill-top where the young feet stand.

All this does not apply only to those things which are absolutely and manifestly vicious, to wanton licentiousness and reckless sin; it applies to all the accidents of life. It is a bad sight for the eyes to see when a young man has come prematurely into the power of those accidents, when he cannot find life abundant without what we call the "comforts of life," even those which have no vicious element about them. What business has the young vigor of twenty to demand that the fire shall be warm and the seat cushioned and the road smooth? Let him not parade his incompetence for life by insisting that life is not worth living unless a man is rich, — unless, that is, the abundance of life should be eked out with wealth, which is an accident of life, not of its essence. Let him not insult himself by behaving as if the sunshine or the shower made a difference to him. Let those poor slaveries wait till the heart is soured and the knees are weak. No! the young man’s place is to scorn delights. We will tolerate any folly of exuberant vitality which vents itself in over-scorn; but the other folly is unnatural and base. Our gilded youth are not — and they ought to know that they are not; they ought to be told that they are not — choice young men when the study of their life is to spare themselves pain and surround themselves with creature comforts. It is a sign that they have not got hold of the sufficiency of life. They do not know what pure gold it is, and so they try to eke it out with gilding. Good is it when their better human nature breaks through sometimes, and in the rough life of the wilderness or the sea, sought by whatever artificial means, demands its right to rejoice in the simplicity of living, in the privations which mean the close, uncushioned contact with life. Sad is it when a community grows more and more to abound in young men who worship wealth and think they cannot live without luxury and physical comfort. The choicest of its strength is gone. The same principle, that life in the young man should be abundant in itself, would find still broader application in every relation of human action. It would bring simplicity and healthiness in every standard. It would rule out and cast aside as impertinent and offensive all that was artificial and untrue. How clear it makes the whole question of the way in which money is to be gained or given! And so it brings us at once to another practical question of young men’s life. Money to the simple, healthy human sense is but the representative of energy and power. It is to pass from man to man only as the symbol of some exertion, some worthy outputting of strength and life. Save in the way of charity, it is not to be given or taken without something behind it which it represents. With his mind full of this simple, honest truth, feeling himself ready to earn his living and to give an equivalent for all that he receives, the young man ought to have an instinctive dislike and scorn for all transactions which would substitute feeble chance for vigorous desert, and make him either the giver or receiver of that which has not even the show of an equivalent or earning. I do not say that gambling and betting are admirable or respectable things in gray-haired men. It is not of them or to them that I am speaking now. I do say that in young men, with the abundance of life within them and around them, gambling and betting, if they be not the result of merest thoughtlessness, are signs of a premature demoralization which hardly any other vice can show. In social life, in club, in college, on the street, the willingness of young men to give or to receive money on the mere turn of chance is a token of the decay of manliness and self-respect which is more alarming than almost anything besides. It has an inherent baseness about it which not to feel shows a base soul. To carry in your pocket money which has become yours by no use of your manly powers, which has ceased to be another man’s by no willing acceptance on his part of its equivalent, — that is a degrading thing. Will it not burn the purse in which you hold it? Will it not blight the luxury for which you spend it? Will you dare to buy the gift of true love with it? Will you offer it in charity? Will you pay it out for the support of your innocent children? Will it not be a Judas-treasure, which you must not put into the treasury, because it is the price of blood? So I rank high among the signs of a choice human youth the clearness of sight and the healthiness of soul which make a man refuse to have anything to do with the transference of property by chance, which make him hate and despise betting and gambling under their most approved and fashionable and accepted forms. Plentiful as those vices are among us, they still in some degree have the grace to recognize their own disgracefulness by the way in which they conceal themselves. Some sort of hiding and disguise they take instinctively. Let even that help to open our eyes to what they really are. To keep clear of concealment, to keep clear of the need of concealment, to do nothing which he might not do out on the middle of Boston Common at noonday, — I cannot say how more and more that seems to me to be the glory of a young man’s life. It is an awful hour when the first necessity of hiding anything comes. The whole life is different thenceforth. When there are questions to be feared and eyes to be avoided and subjects which must not be touched, then the bloom of life is gone. Put off that day as long as possible. Put it off forever if you can. And as you will hold no truth for which you cannot give a reason, so let yourself be possessed of no dollar whose history you do not dare to tell.

It is no drawback from the truth or power of all this that it involves the appeal to sentiment, for (and this is the next thing I want to say) the presence and the power of healthy sentiment is another token of the choice young humanity. Sentiment is the finest essence of the human life. It is, like all the finest things, the easiest to spoil. It bears testimony of itself that it is finer than judgment, because a thousand times when judgment is all clear and right, sentiment is tainted and all wrong. And hosts of men, feeling the mysterious dangers which beset sentiment, would fain banish it altogether. They do not know how to use it, and so they will not try. It is explosive and dangerous, and so it shall be watched and made contraband, like dynamite. How many men do you know who can frankly look you in the face and say a piece of sentiment, and make it seem perfectly real and true, and not make either you or themselves, or both, feel silly and embarrassed by their saying it? Now if men must come to that, the longer it can be before they come to it the better! Let the sentiments have their true, unquestioned power in the young man’s life. Let him glow with admiration, let him burn with indignation, let him believe with intensity, let him trust unquestioningly, let him sympathize with all his soul. The hard young man is the most terrible of all. To have a skin at twenty that does not tingle with indignation at the sight of wrong and quiver with pity at the sight of pain is monstrous. Do you remember in "The Light of Asia" how the young Prince Siddhartha caught his first sight of human suffering?

"Then cried he, while his lifted countenance
Glowed with the burning passion of a love
Unspeakable, the ardor of a hope
Boundless, insatiate, O suffering world,
known and unknown of my common flesh,
Caught in this common net of death and woe
And life, which binds to both! I see, I feel
The vastness of the agony of earth.
The vainness of its joys, the mockery
Of all its best, the anguish of its worst!’" Do you remember the simpler, nobler story of the young Christ? "When He came near He beheld the city, and wept over it." Tell me what becomes of the hard young man, proud of his unsensitiveness, even pretending to be more unsensitive than he is, incapable of enthusiasm, incapable of tears; what becomes of him beside the knightliness of a sorrow such as that? The little child is sensitive without a thought of effort. The old man often feels the joy and pain of men as if the long years had made it his own. But in between, the young man is hardened by self-absorption; when all the time he ought — with his imagination, with his power to realize things he has not been nor seen — to go responsive through the world, answering quickly to every touch, knowing the burdened man’s burden just because of the unpressed lightness of his own shoulders, feeling the sick man’s pain all the more because his own flesh never knew an ache, buoyant through all with his unconquerable hope, overcoming the world with his exuberant faith, and farthest from sentimentality by the abundance and freedom of the sentiment which fills him. Be sure that there is no true escape from softness in making yourself hard. It is like freezing your arm to keep it from decay. Only by filling it with blood and giving it the true flexibility of health, so only is it to be preserved from the corruption which you, fear. Be not afraid of sentiment, but only of untruth. Trust your sentiments, and so be a man.

It would be strange indeed if our first truth did not apply to the whole methods of thought as well as to the actions and the feelings. That truth was, you remember, that youth began with the large circumference, and then filled in the circle gradually with the details of living. It does not start with the small detail and only gradually build out to the large idea. Now, what will that truth mean as we apply it to the intellectual life? Will it not mean that, the choicer a young mind is, the more immediately it will begin with the perception of great truths, which then it’s thought and study and experience will fill out and confirm? It is the place and privilege of the young man to know immediately that God is good, that the world is hopeful, that spirit is real. These great ideas are his ideas. He does not prove God’s existence, building it up out of his own sight of the things God does. He sees God. He, the pure in heart, sees God: and then all his life is occupied in gathering into the substance of the faith which he has won by direct vision, the vividness and definiteness which separate successive experiences of God have to give.

Until we know this method of the young man’s knowledge we shall always be going astray, as I doubt not we are going astray now. We shall discredit every intuitive perception of the fresh nature, and demand of it to go without faith till, we may almost say, the time has come when the gaining of faith is possible no longer. We shall meet the spontaneous utterance of a belief in the spiritual world with a cold, " How do you know? " which, failing to elicit what we call a reasonable answer, will kill the newly born belief and bury it in an early grave of skepticism. But bid the young man believe that which his heart tells him is true, enlarging the testimony of his own heart by the witness of the universal human heart through a docile deference for authority; and then adjure, implore him to be pure and righteous, — for the light cannot come except through purity and righteousness; lust and iniquity are surely darkness — do this, and then you may be sure of — what? Not that your young man will not make a thousand blunders, not that he will not sometimes seem to lose his sight of truth, but that the method of his mental life is right, and so that in the end he must stand clear under a cloudless sky. The world’s strength has been built up thus, by young men believing and uttering the truth they saw, — the greatest, largest truth, — and then their experience filling that truth with solidity, until it became a foundation on which yet greater truth might rest.

Begin with largeness of thought, and with positiveness of thought. The way in which a man begins to think influences all his thinking to the end of his life. Begin by seeking for what is true, not for what is false, in the thought and belief which you find about you. Be as critical as you will, search as severely as you want to into the belief which offers itself for your acceptance, but let your search and criticism always have for its purpose that you may find what you may believe, not that you may find what you need not believe. Some things which your first thinking accepts, your riper thought may feel compelled to lay aside; but the habit of believing once established will not be lost out of your life, and the young man’s time is the time to make that habit. Skepticism is not merely the disbelief of some propositions. If it were that, there is not one of us but would be a skeptic. It is the habit and the preference of disbelieving. God save us all from that skepticism! God save especially our young men from it, for a skeptical young man is a monstrosity.

What shall we say about this whole last matter, the matter of belief, except that the true young man’s life, the choice young man’s life, is bound to be a life of vision. To see the large things in their largeness, — that is his privilege; and there is no privilege which is not a duty too. It is God’s word to Abraham, " Look now toward heaven and tell the stars if thou be able to number them. So shall thy seed be." "And Abraham believed the Lord and it was counted unto him for righteousness." Afterwards came the long journeys and the struggles and the darknesses and the disappointment and the sins; at the last came the quiet rest in the cave of Machpelah which is before Mamre, where they buried him; but the vision of the stars never faded from his eyes. And now I do not know whether there has come at all out of what I have said anything like a clear image of the choice young man. As I said when I began, I should care little to try to create that image if it were some strange, exceptional creature that I was trying to carve. But it is not that; it is the true young human being, the type and flower of the first vigor of humanity. And these are the qualities which we have seen in him, — purity of body, mind, and soul; simple integrity, and a dignity which will not have what is not his, no matter under what specious form of game or wager it has come into his hands; tenderness, sympathy, sentiment, — — call it what name you will, a soul that is not cynical or cruel; and positive, broad thought and conviction. Do these things, as I name them, blend with one another? Does there stand out as their result a figure recognizable and clear, well-knit and strong, brave, generous, and true, but very little conscious of itself, claiming the love and honor of the human heart? For men do love the type and flower of their own young manhood. Little children and young boys look up to it with touching reverence. Old men look back to it with wistful longing, often with a perplexed wonder how they ever passed themselves through a land which they see now to be so rich and kept so little of its richness. Men love and honor it; and their love and honor for the choice young man is only measured by the disappointment and anger and disgust with which they look at the young libertine, the young gambler, the young cynic, the young skeptic, the young fool.

If all these qualities do really blend into a recognizable character and being, then there ought to be some fact, the fine resultant of them all, in which they should all take expression, and which should represent them before the world. As the resultant of all the qualities of a star is its brightness, and the resultant of all the qualities of a flower is its fragrance, and the resultant of all the qualities of an action is its glory, — so the resultant of the purity and integrity and tenderness and thoughtfulness of a young human life ought to be its joy. I cannot count that a separate quality, far less a separate action; it is the radiance, it is the aroma of all the qualities. The depressions of youth are very real, as real and as likely to appear as are the clouds which gather at the rising of the sun. But the sun and not the cloud is the characteristic fact of the morning; and joy, not sadness, is the characteristic fact of young humanity. To know this, to keep it as the truth to which the soul constantly returns, — that is the young man’s salvation. Whatever young depression there is, there must be no young despair. In the morning, at least, it must seem a fine thing to live.

Only once in this sermon have I spoken of Jesus as the specimen of human youth. But He is such a specimen always. And I appeal to all of you who have sympathetically read the Gospels to say whether you do not feel through all His life of sorrow the subtle, certain presence of this joy of which I speak. It breaks out into flame upon the mountain summits of His life; but, where there is no flame, it nestles into warmth in all His ordinary intercourse with men, and it glows with a fervor of consolation which is unmistakable beneath the darkest blackness of His suffering. It is the ideal joy of life, burning through all the hardest and cruelest circumstances of life, and asserting, in spite of everything, the true condition of the Son of God and the Son of Man.

Let this conduct me naturally to the last word I want to say in order to make all that I have said complete. I have spoken of the young man’s character and life, and I have seemed to say nothing at all of his religion. Is it because I have forgotten his religion or thought it of small consequence? God forbid! It is because one of the most effectual and convincing ways to reach religion is to make life seem so noble and exacting that it shall itself seem to demand religion with the great cry, " Who is sufficient for these things? " When not yet driven by the stress of sin and sorrow, but exalted by the revelation of what life might be, and eager with the witness of the truth of that revelation which fills his own self-consciousness, the young man looks abroad for help that he may realize it, then he finds Christ. And he finds Christ in the way that belongs to him just then and there, just in the time and place where he is standing. He finds Christ the model and the master. It is the personal Christ that makes the young man’s religion. "Behold this being, young Himself with the eternal youth, knowing this life which I am just beginning, with the true share in it which made His Incarnation, living now in the heavens and also here by my side, with these dimly felt purposes of life which are in me all perfectly clear and bright and glorious in Him, — behold this Christ standing before me, pointing to the heights of the completed human life, and saying not, ’Go there,’ but saying, ’Follow me,’ — going before us into the land our souls desire!" When religion comes to mean simply following Christ, when the young man gives himself to Christ as his Leader and his Lord, when he prays to Christ with the entire sense that he is laying hold of the perfect strength for the perfect work, — then the whole circle is complete. Power and purpose, purpose and power, both are there; and only the eternal growth is needed for the infinite result.

It is always sad not to feel the choiceness of anything which has in it wonderful and fine capacities, — to be content with the ordinariness and coarseness of that which is capable of being exquisite and great. Oh, that there could thrill through the being of our young men some electrical sense that they are God’s sons, that so they might make themselves the servants of His Christ, and live the life and attain the nature which are rightly theirs. God grant it for the young men who are here to-day!