The Golden Censer | Page 7

in human kindness, to our younger associates, and sound our warning in their ears. According as our earnestness impresses them, they listen or they hearken not. A golden thought which the young should learn by heart, would run thus: _However highly I have valued this day, I have "sold it on a rising market," and too cheaply. It would grow in value as I looked back upon it, even if I were to live to my eightieth year_. This may not seem true to you, who wish for Saturday night, that you may receive your salary,--or to you, who long for Sunday, that you may gaze into a pair of eyes that have deep beauties for you--but when your mother in your babyhood, said a certain letter was "A,"
YOU HAD TO ACCEPT THE STATEMENT
without reservation, or you would not now be able to exercise the grandest of human faculties--to read, to glean the thoughts of the ages, and to receive, without toiling through the rugged regions of experience, the impressions and the inspirations which have come to man through all his labors and his pains. Sir William Hamilton has well said that implicit belief is at the foundation of all human happiness--the knowledge of the mind, as well as the certainty of the future life.
The mind is rarely broad enough in youth to survey the field of life with an impartial view. "The years creep slowly by, Lorena," was written in the true youthful, spendthrift spirit.
"COAL-OIL JOHNNY"
was left, as he supposed, inexhaustible riches. He threw away his money as many of us throw away our lives, and his money lasted him two years. Had his life been equally at his disposal, he would have been in the hands of the pale Receiver, Death, when his oil-wells passed to other owners. Having so precious a pearl, therefore, as this life, let us make its setting a thing of beauty. Let us invest our moments as
THE WISE MAN,
who, instead of buying on time and paying eight per cent. interest, saves his earnings and puts them out at eight per cent. interest, thus reaping a difference of sixteen per cent., or nearly one-sixth of his yearly surplus. Every idea put into your head is invested at interest. Every expenditure of time which is a waste is a payment of interest, a corroding, double-acting agency of evil to your welfare.
YOU WANT TO SUCCEED IN THE WORLD,--
of course, you do! Look out, and do not let the thrifty men of brains lend you their ideas at that fatal eight per cent., which, in reality, means fully sixteen! Put into the deposit-vaults of your memory the diligent results of your study. Those you put in earliest will pay the most profit. When you are thirty years old there will be few with heavier coffers. You will have little need to complain of
FAVORITISM AND DISCRIMINATION
then. On the contrary, you will, strangely enough, hear many lay that very charge against those wise old men who have been observing you and peeping into your treasure-chests when you were not on the watch. To the man, fortunate in his youth in having been
ADVISED RIGHTLY,
who has not misspent a moment of his time, "the thought of the last bitter hour" will not "come like a blight," and there will be no "sad images of the stern agony." The wise and good man, who has the unmixed reverence of the great and the humble, whose "hoary head is a crown of glory," approaches his grave "like one who wraps the drapery of his couch about him, and lies down to pleasant dreams." "I wasted time, and now doth time waste me!" is the cry of a misspent life. If you have cast away a portion of your existence, I beg of you to transfix this public notice before your companions that they may profit by your experience:
"LOST!
"Yesterday, somewhere between sunrise and sunset, two golden hours, each set with sixty diamond minutes, the gift of a kind Father!"
HASTE AND WASTE.
The value of Time should never be so foolishly conceived as to urge a man or a woman to that hurry which shows a thing to be too big for him who undertakes it. God makes Time. Can you, then, add to it? "Stay a while to make an end the sooner." You do not gain an hour by robbing yourself of your sleep. You do not gain in force by enlarging the wheel that carries your belting. If your constitution require eight hours' sleep, then go to your bed at ten o'clock and rise like "the sun rejoicing in the east," fresh-nerved and forceful, apt to carry all before you. Do not encourage those tempters who come to you asking you to break into the storehouse of your vitality and rob yourself of