The glory of young men is their strength.
The glory of young men
Power, force, might, strength, are divers names for a thing which always has been, and always will be, admirable in human esteem. In all its forms it is a glorious thing. The man of indomitable will is always an object of reverence to his fellows. In every region of the humanities the man who can do the most, and with the least apparent expenditure of power, acquires a kind of moral chieftainship among his compeers in the same sphere. The text says that strength is the peculiar glory of young men. Other things will come by and by, but this is the thing that comes first. The glory of young men is not their wisdom. Young men are not generally very wise. They make a good many mistakes. The time for wisdom will come, whether the wisdom will come or not. The strength that is to be their glory is physical, bodily strength. A vast multitude of soul-ills come of a much lower kind of ill. Some men are born weak. And it is a very terrible thing, though a very merciful thing for the world. It is God’s law for preventing the perpetuation of moral evil. It is a provision that depraved lives of humanity shall die out if they do not, by conforming to the Divine laws, repair and improve themselves. There are some young men who are shorn of their glory, and have nobody to blame but themselves. What caricatures of humanity one sometimes passes in the street, in the form of young men! And there are old young men, enervated by folly and wickedness, doomed to drag out a weary existence for a few years, with no proper force for any of life’s duties and relations, and self-doomed. Keep, I beseech you, by all the means in your power, a strong, healthy body--vigorous, athletic, nervous, firm. But the text means more than this. Body is not yet manhood. There is moral power. One wants a deal of moral force, especially at life’s beginning, to live a true, and worthy, and noble life. Force is of two sorts: there is quiet force-inertia, and there is active force-motion. Both of these sorts of force go to make manhood. You must try to get moral solidity, gravity, weight, firmness, immovability, steadfastness. The elements of this force are conviction and decision. You must try to get active force, enthusiasm, energy, enterprise. Without this, nothing is done in any department of life. Seek the ability to go out of yourselves, to do and to dare for God. (G. W. Conder.)
The glory of young men
Men look with admiration and with awe upon great power, wherever it is seen. The visitor to Niagara cannot but be moved by the thought of the immeasurable power of that river as it dashes over the declivity. The man of power has always been the object of the veneration of his less talented fellow-men. He has but to move and straightway his movements are chronicled all over the civilised world. There is no sight in all the earth so impressive as is that of young manhood in its youthful power and vigour of faculty, eager for the struggle of life.
I. The strength of young manhood should be controlled. Power is productive of good only when its energies are guided in right channels and directed to right uses by intelligence and wisdom. When power becomes master and goes out from beneath the hand of wise control it is always destructive. The locomotive, Titan giant serving men meekly so long as they hold its movements obedient to their will, goes crashing into the train ahead, because the engineer has lost control of his iron steed; and the shrieks of the wounded and the moans of the dying tell us of the awful death-dealing ability of great power which has become a law to itself. The waters behind the dam at South Fork were harmless, except potentially, so long as they were controlled. They served only to further the peaceful industries of the mountain valley. But, breaking the bonds and acknowledging no ruler but anarchy, they spread desolation in their wake. Powerful though machinery and the forces of nature are, they are pigmies in comparison with a young man. He has done more than they all. What the world is to-day it has been made by young men. “Through all time, the greatest victories have been achieved, the wisest and most beneficent reforms instituted, the greatest Christian enterprises undertaken, and the most decided impetus given to the advance of the world by men who have “begun to be about thirty years of age.” Bichat, French physician and physiologist, had revolutionised the practice of medicine and died before he was thirty-one. John Wesley founded the Methodist Church before he was thirty-six. Luther was thirty-three when he nailed his theses to the door of Wittenberg Church. Wilbrrforce had compelled England to free all her slaves by the time he was thirty-two. At the same age Watt had invented the steam-engine. But on the other hand the destructive influence of the strength of young manhood, when that strength is not wisely controlled, is seen when we glance at the rosters of our jails and penal institutions and discover the fact that the inmates of those institutions are for the most part young men. History also reminds us that Alexander the Great had made his name odious, conqueror of the world though he was, by the time he was thirty-three, and Napoleon had come to ignominy by the time he was thirty-four.
II. But this strength of young manhood should also be conserved, One of the most difficult things to impress upon young men is the fact they will not always be overflowing, as they are in their teens and twenties, with strength and spirits. When God makes a man, He puts into him a certain amount of life-force. When that is consumed, there is no way in which it may be replaced. Ruskin overtaxed himself in his younger days, with the result that the lamp of his genius burned but dimly in later life. Walter Scott did the same, and suffered the same fate. Scientists tell us that there is no reason why a man should not live past the century mark in years, if he be well born and if he conserve his strength. It lies within the power of every well-born man so to use the strength which nature has given him that, as the psalmist says, “in old age he shall be fat and flourishing.”
III. This strength of young men should also be concentrated. “This one thing I do.” Success in life depends upon concentration of one’s energies upon one thing. Paul was a successful preacher because he was “determined to know nothing but Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” The sun casts a genial warmth over a large area, but if we wish to light a fire by it we must take the sun-glass and concentrate its rays upon one point.
IV. This power should also be consecrated. This is the capstone and the keystone of all that we have thus far pointed out. “Whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God.” The subordination of every power and faculty to the law contained in the great commandment will in itself lead to the control, the conservation, and the concentration of power and faculty. (R. S. Young.)
The glory of young men
Man has a threefold nature--physical, mental, and spiritual; body, brain, and soul. Therefore there are three kinds of strength--physical, intellectual, spiritual. There is a close connection between health and virtue. “Before any vice can fasten on a man, his physical nature must be debilitated.” The conditions of health are--
1. We must learn the laws of our physical well-being.
2. We must act and live up to these laws. The laws of health are--pure air, suitable food, and sufficient exercise. You have a healthy craving for innocent recreation. Do not repress it. It is God-implanted, and therefore sacred, sacred as are any of the other Divine instincts within you. You have a many-sided nature, and every side must have a fair chance of development. Intellectual strength. The mind is the measure of the man; it is the empire or kingdom of the soul. The thinker is the acknowledged king of men. A trained mind, developed by reading and reflection, is worth striving for. Moral and spiritual strength. A clever man is greater than a merely strong man, but a good man is greater than either. Moral and spiritual gains are the most enduring. (David Watson.)
The glory of youth and the beauty of age
I. Godliness makes the strength of young men glorious.
1. Because that strength is governed by a glorious inspiration.
2. Because it is directed to glorious ends.
3. Because it endows him with a glorious steadfastness of principle, an unswerving attachment to the right.
4. Because of the glorious reward he will finally attain.
II. Godliness makes the hoary heads of age beautiful.
1. Godly age is beautiful, because of its wealth of experience.
2. Because it is connected with maturity of Christian character.
3. Because of the connection with a holy peace and brightening hope.
III. The beauty of the grey head is the natural and fitting result of the developed glory of youthful strength. Pious strength in the earlier half of life is the seed that ripens into the glad harvest of hopeful, resting readiness which should mark the end.
1. Youthful godliness is likely to secure the beauty of age, because godly principles and practices are best calculated to lengthen life.
2. Because the conduct of youth gives character to age. (Jackson Wray.)
The glory of young men
1. Ideals of manhood have differed with every age. Physical strength was the primary glory of the race. Samson among the Hebrews, Hector among the Trojans, Achilles among the Greeks, and Richard the Lion-hearted among the Crusaders, were as valuable as batteries or battalions now are. Until Christian civilisation changed it, the measure of the man was his muscle, and his passport to respect was his fighting weight. But we live in a different era. Gunpowder and dynamite have abolished physical differences and put all men on a common level. It is not brawn but brain which tell in this age. Christianity has subordinated the material to the mental. “There is nothing great in the world but man; there is nothing great in man but mind.”
2. But there are two kinds of mental strength--a lower and a higher order, the intellectual and the spiritual. There is something better than a clear, cold intellectuality. Man has a heart as well as a head, emotions as well as thoughts. Some of the most atrocious characters in history were men of giant intellect. The Duke of Alva was accomplished and scholarly. As mental strength is higher in rank than the physical, so moral strength is higher than the merely mental. The most valuable possession in this world for a young man is strength of character. With it poverty, obscurity, and ill-health are not misfortunes. Without it wealth, fame, and physical endurance are not blessings. But how little this is appreciated by youth.
3. Every boy longs to be a man. It is a legitimate ambition. But does he know manhood’s perils? The moral innocence of childhood grown into manhood is a thousandfold stronger than reformed manhood, built out of the fragments which were gathered up from the wreck and ruin of the former self.
4. The great arena for the development of moral strength is in conquering one’s self.
5. But how shall this hardest of victories be won--the victory of self? Remember Constantine’s vision. So with you. By the Cross of Christ thou shalt conquer. The testimony of the unrighteous to the worth of religion as a moral armour is an exceedingly valuable testimony. (J. C. Jackson, D. D.)
Muscular Christianity
I. Physical strength. We are prone to glorify and exalt the man of strong intellect at the expense of the muscular man. We are apt to despise physical strength, and look upon it as something very necessary in an ox or horse, but nothing for a Christian to be proud of. The development of physical strength lies very much with ourselves. Physical development is related to mental and moral culture as the foundation to the superstructure which rests upon it. The best students carry their physical and mental training along together. Nor should we lose sight of the influence of physical training upon the morals of the young. Muscular Christianity is the kind of religion that will live, and make itself felt in the world. Mawkish sentimentality is not religion. But if our strength is to be a glory to us it must be consecrated strength. There are those who value their strength, not for the amount of good they can accomplish with it, but for the amount of supposed pleasure or vice their strength enables them to indulge in. Such strength is no glory to young men.
II. Mental strength. No college can confer brains where nature has withheld them; and yet it is true that, as regards intellectual power, we are very much what we make ourselves. It is not those endowed naturally with great talents who rule in the political, social, and religious world. It is those of medium talents, men of activity, diligence, and earnestness, who go up to the top of the ladder--those who deposit their mental capital, such as it is, where it will give the highest interest. Hard work kills very few. The men who live longest are those who combine severe mental labour with proper physical exercise.
III. Moral strength. If a man lack moral strength, he is no giant, but a mere pigmy, in so far as usefulness in the world is concerned. Moral strength consists--
1. In the courage to do the right.
2. To feel our own weakness.
3. Another element in moral strength is a godly life.
A consistent man is a tower of strength. He is a resistless power for good. The godly lives of humble, consistent Christians are the most powerful sermons. (Richmond Logan, M. A.)
The beauty of age
Spring has its charms, peculiar to itself, and so has summer, and so has autumn--each unlike the other, but the last by no means inferior to the others. There is a beauty peculiar to youth, and a beauty that belongs to manhood; is there not a beauty which belongs to age, unlike youth, unlike middle life, but something analogous to the glory of the autumnal foliage? Sometimes we see it. At other times, disease, overwork, trouble, sorrow, are a blight whose wasting has destroyed all beauty. But an old age, a late afternoon, that has escaped this, why should it not be like an autumn afternoon, bright and beautiful? Would it be an improvement to change the turning leaves into fresh green again? Would you rob us of the autumnal beauty, and take the later glory from the hillsides? It is most uncomely in man or woman, when old, to affect youthfulness--in dress and manner, and association, to go back to early life--to endeavour in this to be what one is not. The attempt is always a failure. This is a wheel that can never be turned backward. On the other hand, it is painful to see age anticipated, a premature age affected and taken on. Let the days linger, if they will. Let the leaves continue green, if they may. But there is a beauty, a bloom, a joyousness belonging to the maturity and ripeness of full age. Beauty is not unbecoming age. Bloom is not unbecoming age, neither is joyousness then unbecoming. But let it be itself such as befits age and belongs to it. Let it be the royal purple, running into the dun brown, unlike the verdure of the spring time--its own type of beauty--such as comes only when the sun runs low. In some localities, as the late autumn days are frosty and crisp, you may find by the wayside a flower, there opening its cluster of blossoms in full beauty, in the clear autumn air seeming to have caught the hue of the sky--a pure cerulean blue--the fringed gentian. Why does it blossom so late, with its heavenly hue, unless it be to remind us that there are flowers peculiar to the late autumn of life, and that they should be the evident reflection of heaven? Age may be beautiful with its own adornments. We dwell the longer on this because it is due to age, and because we would dissuade from that mistake, into which some fall, of anticipating and magnifying the sadder aspects of advanced life. As you grow old, be cheerful, if you may. Keep the affections of the heart fresh and warm. If your leaf must fall, forbid it not, while still it hangs, to redden and disport its beauty. If possible, let your sky be open as the sun goes down. (Alfred E. Ives.).