Men in the Making | Page 7

need not fail in any degree that success is possible to you; and a success is possible to you in which are issues of everlasting life. Whatever the past, build up with courage and humility what you can do. God willing, and by His grace, you have time yet to prove how a consecrated determination can stretch out life's limits, and wondrously redeem no little of past failure.

YOUTH'S STRATEGIC PLACES
"I have written unto you, young men, because ye are strong."--1 St. John ii. 14.
II
YOUTH'S STRATEGIC PLACES
"I have written unto you, young men, because ye are strong." This description "young men" probably indicates that those to whom this part of St. John's letter was addressed were seriously engaged in the work of grounding their character, forming their habits, disciplining their inclinations, and confirming the election all must make between good and evil. He was not writing to those who had failed in the struggle, and had accepted their defeat. He was not writing to those who, beaten, knew that they did not intend to try again, and had thus written themselves out of the progressive forces of the human world. He was writing to those who had shown promise of better things, who were evidently pressing "toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus." I do not take it that the Apostle credits the young men to whom he wrote with having won a victory which is never finally decided on this side the grave, or with having attained to a moral altitude outside the reach of their years. When he says, "I have written unto you, young men, because ye are strong," he may be understood as referring to a strength consistent with, and yet peculiar to, their years--a strength the whole force of which was set in a right and healthy direction.
I want now to deal with the first part of this particular reference to the strength of young men. It would be away from my present purpose to weight this address with any attempt to say what the writer means when he tells them that, "The word of God abideth in you, and ye have overcome the wicked one." I shall take the words of our text out of their context, and use them as a topic: "I have written unto you, young men, because ye are strong." Strong in what sense? How may we give the words a useful setting, as a remembrancer and a call to the young men of to-day?
In the first place, one great constituent of strength which is, or ought to be, the special possession of young life is--Hope. It is a common remark that as we grow older we become chary of convictions, and content ourselves with opinions. I should be sorry to believe it, but I am obliged to admit that age, even with good people, changes to a large extent their centre of gravity from hope to faith.
It is suggestive to mark the order of these in St. Paul's famous procession--faith, hope, love. Love, he says, is the greatest. But he ranks hope before faith. Why? The passage in which this classification occurs is part of the distinctive literature of the Bible. Hence terms are not used carelessly. What is the difference between the two? "Hope," says David Hume, "is the real riches of human life; as fear is the real poverty."
Hope is that which is "at the bottom of the vase," as the ancients said, when "every other thing has gone out of it"--by which, as it has been suggested, they probably meant the human heart. "While hope trembles in expectation, faith is quiet in possession. Hope leaps out towards what will be; faith holds on to what is. Hope idealizes; faith realizes. Faith sees; hope foresees." [1] In other words, faith is apt to be content with what it has; hope ventures out to annex the wider provinces of the imagination. Faith is the prose of our religious life, hope is its poetry.
Unless you think about it, this will glance off your mind as a distinction without a difference. It is more than that, in the sense I am using the distinction. The loss of youth is not so much in the flight of years, as in the stealing away of our hopes. We may be justified by faith, but we are saved by hope, in theology and in life. There are twenty men who have faith in Christ for one man who has hope that His Spirit will ever incarnate itself in the life of the world. As we get older, most of us, I am afraid, are only too glad to keep our faith in great principles, without hoping much for them. The usual product of experience, and more