Sermons at Rugby | Page 7

about in the world, spoiling the manhood and
embittering the age of so many men, we cannot forget the essential
difference between mature years and the years of early growth.

As we grow towards manhood our life necessarily loses its childlike
and unreflecting spontaneity in the ferment of thought, desire, and
passion, and in the light of experience; and therefore it becomes a
matter of no slight importance to estimate the value of that which we
hold in our hands to-day, the nature of the web which our conduct is
weaving, and the fateful character of any mistake in the purposes,
notions, ambitions, or tastes that are, as a matter of fact, fixing the drift
and direction of our life. But to do this amidst all the daily temptations
of life is not always an easy matter; and it is certain that we shall not do
it if we do not fully recognise, while our life is still young and
unhampered, the importance of these two very obvious reflections,
which, in fact, resolve themselves into one, that our time is essentially
short, and that our opportunities are very fugitive.
In one sense, no doubt, there is a long stretch of time before most of
you. As yet hope has more to say to you than memory. Some of you
will look back on these early days from the distant years of another
century. Your life's journey may extend far away over the unexplored
future, and may in some cases be a very long one; but, although this is
possible, we are not allowed to forget that it is always
precarious--unexpected graves are constantly reminding us how short
may be the time of any one of us--how the night cometh.
But it is not merely of the literal shortness of our time, or the possible
nearness of death, that our Lord's words should set us thinking, when
He warns us that the night cometh, and we must work while it is day.
If we measure our life by the things we should accomplish in it, by the
character it should attain to, by the purposes that should be bearing fruit
in it, and not by mere lapse of time, we soon come to feel how very
short it is, and the sense of present duty grows imperative. It is thus that
the thoughtful man looks at his life; and he feels that there is no such
thing as length of days which he can without blame live carelessly,
because in these careless days critical opportunities will have slipped
away irrecoverably; he will have drifted in his carelessness past some
turning-point which he will not see again, and have missed the
so-called chances that come no more.

But even this is only a part of the considerations that make our present
life so precious; for this is only the outer aspect of it. What makes our
time so critically short, whether we consider its intellectual or its moral
and spiritual uses, is that our nature is so very sensitive, so easily
marred by misuse, and spoilt irretrievably. The real brevity of the time
at your disposal, whether for the training of your mind, or for your
growth into the character of good men, consists in this, that
deterioration is standing always at the back of any neglect or waste.
Deterioration is the inseparable shadow of every form of ignoble life.
"Our acts our angels are, for good or ill, Our fatal shadows that walk
with us still."
Leave your faculties unused and they become blunted and dulled; leave
your higher tastes uncultivated and they die; let your affections feed on
anything unworthy and they become debased.
To those who do this it may happen that whilst, so far as years go, they
are still in all the freshness of youth, they are already dying that death
to all higher capacity which is worse than any decay of our physical
organism. Such an early death of higher tastes and faculties, and of
hope for the future, is sometimes effected even before schooldays are
over. And the mere possibility of such a fate overhanging any of us
should stir us like a trumpet-call to take care that we do not surrender
our life to any mean influence, and that we are very zealous for all that
concerns the safety of the young.
"I send out my child," I can imagine the parent of any one of you
having said, "to be trained for manhood; I send him to his school that
his intellect may be cultivated, his moral purpose made strong, and that
all good and pure tastes may be fostered in him; but it is dreadful to
think that instead of this he may, by his life and companionship there,
be hardened and debased, or