Produced by Al Haines Five Young Men Messages of Yesterday for the Young Men of To-day By CHARLES REYNOLDS BROWN _Dean of the School of Religion, Yale University_ NEW YORK CHICAGO TORONTO Fleming H. Revell Company LONDON AND EDINBURGH Copyright, 1917, by FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY New York: 158 Fifth Avenue Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. London: 21 Paternoster Square Edinburgh: 75 Princes Street _To the Young Men_ _of Yale_ _Whose friendship I have highly valued and in whose future I feel the warmest interest_ Preface These addresses were given in the United Church on the Green, New Haven, Connecticut, on the Sunday evenings of Lent. The audiences were made up largely of men, many of them Yale students. I have brought the addresses together in this little book with the hope that they may have a certain value in their appeal to a wider audience of young men who in school and college, in their homes and in business life, are making those determinations which will decide the issue for them in those exacting years which are before us. It has been given to us to live through one of the great crises of the world's history. In these days the hearts of men are being tried as by fire. If it is "wood, hay and stubble" that we are putting into our personal moral structures, into the purposes and methods which rule our industrial life and into our national temper and fiber, then we may expect to see our work destroyed. The only qualities which will stand the test are those qualities which are symbolized by "gold, silver and precious stones." C. R. B. _Yale University._ Contents I. THE YOUNG MAN WHO WAS A FAVOURITE SON II. THE YOUNG MAN WHO WAS AN ATHLETE III. THE YOUNG MAN WHO BECAME KING IV. THE YOUNG MAN WHO WAS BORN TO THE PURPLE V. THE YOUNG MAN WHO CHANGED THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD I The Young Man Who Was a Favourite Son Which would you say is the harder to bear, adversity or prosperity? I am not sure. If I were a betting man I would not know on which horse to put my money. The Bible says, "The destruction of the poor is their poverty." The narrowness and the meagreness of their lives, the lack of access to the highest interests seems to drive them oftentimes into the coarser forms of indulgence which are their undoing. The Bible also says, "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God." The millionaire who strives to be thoroughly Christian in all his attitudes and actions, in the secret desires which rule his own soul and in the relations he sustains to his fellow men by reason of his wealth has a hard task. In every great city you will find the sons of millionaires falling down or flinging themselves away in thoughtless dissipation where the sons of toil are standing up and making good.