improvement shall be stayed upon their accession to the high places of power and responsibility. They will enter upon their career with peculiar advantages. The accumulations of past ages constitute their resources for new enterprises. The light of rich and varied experiments shines full upon their pathway, and the wonderful discoveries of the last half century constitute the vantage-ground from which they are allowed to commence their new career. If with facilities so many and so great, unknown to their predecessors, they shall do no more than maintain the actual status of the intelligence, and happiness, and virtue of the community, they are destined to act but an inglorious part. They ought to contribute to the welfare of society such measures of new light, and vivacity, and momentum, as will quicken and multiply the energies of every ameliorating enterprise. This is their proper function and vocation, for which they should diligently equip themselves, as champions whose eyes are already fixed upon the arena of the coming conflict.

The actual state of education, morals, and happiness in a community, may be regarded as the true expression of the power of the moral and intellectual forces engaged for its improvement. The efficiency and usefulness of a church, for instance, are precisely what the zeal, purity, and intelligence of its members can make it. We may conclude, therefore, that the Christian enterprises of the present time must remain stationary, without some new accession of moral resources. If the rising generation shall come forward with only the same degrees of piety and intelligence that belong to their fathers, then the utmost that can be expected is, that the cause of religion and humanity shall not retrograde. Progress, under the circumstances supposed, is wholly out of the question. The church is now barely able to hold its ground against the opposing forces of sin and error, or to advance with a tardy step to future triumphs; and if it is to be recruited and reinforced by such members and ministers only as already wield its destinies, it must remain in essentially the same condition, while the accession of even a few persons of deeper piety, and stronger faith, and larger views, might sweep away the obstacles that retard its progress, and open a career of unexampled successes. A single individual of enlarged conceptions of duty, and burning zeal for Christ, is sometimes able to communicate new spirit to a whole church which has, for years, scarcely given a sign of vitality. It had just enough of moral power to maintain a bare existence, and resist the pressure from without; and now the additional impetus given by one true man of God puts everything in motion and triumphs over obstacles. What victories, then, might we not anticipate, what

enlargement for Zion, could the whole host of our young men be induced to gird themselves with strength, and enter upon the whitening field to which they are called, with something like the spirit of primitive Christianity? It would be as a new life from the dead. It would be as the birth of a new dispensation. They who are ready to perish would revive again, and all the islands of the sea would rejoice.

Manifestly it is such a revival of heavenly charity, and wisdom, and apostolic zeal, that is imperatively demanded by the present condition of all our social and Christian enterprises. The passing era will ever be recognized in history as an age of noble conceptions and of great moral convictions. It has planned, and begun to execute, godlike enterprises, but it evidently lacks the sinews needful for their successful accomplishment. It reels under the burdens it has assumed. The existing race of Christians has propagated sublime ideas, which it is appointed for their successors to realize in sublime achievements. This is in accordance with a great law. An age of discovery leads in an age of performance. First comes the science, and then its applications to life. The church is well furnished with grand ideas. It has on its hands comprehensive evangelizing schemes, whose successful accomplishment will usher in the millennium. What she now wants is agents to execute them. She wants an army of young men, large-minded and large-hearted, and deeply baptized into the Saviour's spirit. This is the great want to which all others are subordinate. Let it be supplied, and all other obstacles will vanish away. The cause of Christ and humanity calls for men-needs men-cultivated, sanctified, selfsacrificing, brave men, and it really wants nothing else to the completeness of its triumphs. Material resources with which the church overflows, only wait for the bidding of lips touched with holy fire to call them forth upon the altar of sacrifice. And now what Christian young man will endure the thought, that all these goodly enterprises for the improvement and salvation of the race shall fail or languish for want of worthy champions? The church has just now started forth from the ignominious repose of centuries, and trembles to recognise itself as charged by Christ with the evangelization of the world. Shall this work, so nobly begun, fail or languish for want of labourers? Is it tolerable to think of, that the triumph of Christ shall be postponed, and the deadly curse of sin continue to blight the hopes of three-fourths of the human race, because we love our ease and our money, and because our young men have shallow piety and huge ambition? We have discovered that the general diffusion of a more thorough and effective common education is

absolutely indispensable for a self-governing people, and that whatever else our republic has or lacks, the preservation of freedom and happiness without this great reform is an impossibility. The work is already begun, and the means for its extension and completion are at least partially provided. Will our young men accept of this holy trust at the hands of their fathers? Are they ready to offer themselves for a service equally commended to their favour by religion and patriotism? Good men, who are yet alive, were the first to know and proclaim that the exhilarating bowl, which fashion had long made indispensable in the high places of society, and appetite had made the tyrant and the scourge of common life—which was fondly kissed by ruby lips, and inspired the eloquence of grave ecclesiastics, is an accursed poisoned chalice, which has drugged our people with disease, and vice, and damning guilt. This fearful truth had nearly succeeded in penetrating the heart of our population, and making its lodgment in the public conscience, when, through the weariness of some of its advocates, and the indiscretions of others, the apathy of the church, and the sleepless efforts of interested dealers, their deluded victims, and demagogue abettors, a paralyzing reaction has befallen the great enterprise, and the polluting cup is again brought forth from its hiding-place-again sparkles at the feast, and maddens the joyous circle of our youth. Are our educated young men prepared to preach up another crusade, and march in the van of another holy war against this worse than the false prophet? Our own favoured land, and the entire Christian world, unquestionably labour under great and grievous social evils. Our intense and highly artificial civilization does, in some of its modes and operations, press with dreadful and almost exterminating severity upon the happiness, the hopes, and the virtues of large classes of the people. Ignorant quacks, and interested pretenders and demagogues, are everywhere prescribing absurd and pernicious remedies for this inveterate disease. Religion and education possess the true panacea, and they would enlist an army of valiant, wise philanthropists in an enterprise which must fail in ordinary hands. Are our young men ready for this good work also? Will this call to holy duties be able to make itself heard amid the incitements to selfishness and ambition which throng the avenues to professional and public life?

For the satisfaction of these, and other moral and social wants, which press so heavily upon our country and the human race, intelligent, pious young men are at this moment the only adequate resource. Others, who have a heart for such work, are already occupied, and their energies are already fully tasked in maintaining

these great moral enterprises in their actual state of advancement. They look to the young for the succour without which reaction and ignominious retrogression will be unavoidable. They boldly confront the foe and keep him at bay, whilst, with every muscle strained, they beckon to their sons to " come and help them."

Young men alone can be fully adapted to the special exigencies of their own times. Those who have been long engaged in any department of action acquire habits favourable to success in their particular pursuit, which often become disqualifications under a change of circumstances, or for new enterprises. The middle-aged pastor will generally be found essentially unfit for the new duties and ideas of missionary life. He cannot learn strange languages, and inure himself to new climates and modes of life. The young man, on the contrary, has nothing to unlearn. He is pliable and plastic, ready to be moulded into any form of physical and mental activity which the exigencies of the times may demand. When the French revolution had brought on a crisis in human affairs unknown in the world's previous history, old statesmen and old generals were found universally unfit for the new exigency, and supreme power, civil and military, passed, as if in obedience to some hidden law, to the vigorous hands of Napoleon, and Pitt, and Talleyrand, and Wellington, all young men, who took their character from the crisis, and in their turn impressed it upon the times. Several of our great benevolent enterprises, which are rapidly extending their influences to the remotest nations of the earth, were projected by young men, while they were still under-graduates; and Mills, and Judson, and Newell, passed immediately from the schools into the distant lands where they laid the foundations of Christian empires. Young men have usually been Heaven's chosen depositaries of new and great ideas, and its chosen instruments for effecting beneficent revolutions. They soonest hear, and most deeply feel, the appeals of suffering humanity, and their character most readily conforms itself to the hue and pressure of their era.

For prudent counsels, and the conduct of grave negotiations, for the conservation of holy truths and time-honoured institutions, for the safe management of the great trusts and established interests of human society, we are to look to the serene, unimpassioned wisdom of more advanced life; but new and difficult enterprises, and daring moral adventures that are without precedent in the memory of the aged, must, for the most part, expect to enlist their champions from the ranks of buoyant, unhackneyed youth. This is eminently the period of mental and bodily vigour and power. The warm blood courses bravely through the veins, and every limb and muscle re

joices in action. The bosom swells with high hopes, which disappointment has not yet chilled with its paralyzing touch. The young are wont to place confidence in man, in human improvement, in truth, and in the power of endeavour. Experience has not yet made them timid, nor broken the spirit of adventure. The future rises up before them gorgeous with rich promise, and opulent in hidden resources. Religion chastens, but it does not dim these vivid conceptions and lofty aspirations of the young. Very often, indeed, the discoveries of faith far outstrip and outshine the visions of fancy; and what was sheer extravagance in the expectations of the natural man, becomes an object of sober and reasonable pursuit with him who has received an endowment of strength from on high. It is a great point gained when we can get young men, constitutionally prone to adventure and activity, who love labour, and fear nothing—whose bounding hearts impel them onward, as if conscious that to will and to achieve were tasks equally feasible—it is a great thing to get all these elements of efficiency fairly embarked in some holy enterprise in which the smallest degrees of success might satisfy the most ardent ambition, and the grandeur and certainty of whose triumphs can sustain the spirit of man under all the vicissitudes of hope deferred. Here is found precisely that conjunction of circumstances which is most favourable to the highest development of the best qualities of the heart and the intellect. The inspiration of an object divinely sublime, and yet in closest contact with all the benevolent feelings; the prospect of a glorious reward, acting without prejudice to conscious, disinterested philanthropyinfallible guarantees of ultimate, complete success-offer a combination of motives that cannot fail to exalt the human powers to their utmost capacity, and even to make ordinary men great.

In addition to the inspiration of ennobling pursuits acting upon the plastic nature and fervent temperament of fresh and buoyant life, Christianity furnishes to young men other and peculiar elements of strength. The word of God abideth in them,” and they are thus supplied, from the beginning of their career, with rules of action and maxims of life perfectly adapted to all their circumstances and wants. It is not necessary to prove that the Bible, which is the expression of Divine wisdom, announces to man the true method of life. It contains the mind of God, and makes known to us the decisions of the highest intelligence. In all matters of high moral import it reveals to us, in anticipation of experience, those great practical lessons which cannot be learned elsewhere, if at all, but by years of careful observation and laborious experiment. Wisdom acquired by methods so tedious and expen