Those are hints[1] which may be found useful. "Religion never was designed," it is said, "to make our pleasures less." Religion also, if we know what it means, will ever lead us to what are true, innocent, and elevating pleasures, and keep us from those that are false, bad in their influence, and which "leave a sting behind them." "Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth, and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth, and walk in the ways of thine heart and in the sight of thine eyes: but know thou, that for all these things God will bring thee into judgment." Let those who practise the first part of that text not forget the second. [1] I am indebted for some of them to an article in _The Christian Union_. CHAPTER XIII. BOOKS. Books have an influence on life and conduct the extent of which it is impossible to estimate. "The precepts they inculcate, the lessons they exhibit, the ideals of life and character which they portray, root themselves in the thoughts and imaginations of young men. They seize them with a force which, in after years, appears scarcely possible." These words of Principal Tulloch will not appear too strong to any one who can look back over a long period of life. Such must ever feel that books have had a powerful effect in making them all that they are. There are many considerations that go to show the importance of books. Books are the accumulated treasures of generations.--They are to man what memory is to the individual. If all the libraries in the world were burned and all the books in the world destroyed, the past would be little more than a blank. It would be a calamity corresponding to that of a man losing by a stroke the memory of past years. The literature of the world is the world's memory, the world's experience, the world's failures. It teaches us where we came from. It tells us of the paths we have travelled. Almost all we know of the history of this world in which God has placed us we know from books. "In books," as Carlyle says, "lie the creative Phoenix ashes of the whole past--all that men have desired, discovered, done, felt, or imagined, lie recorded in books, wherein whoso has learned the mystery of spelling printed letters may find it and appropriate it." Books open to us a society from which otherwise we would be excluded.--They introduce us into a great human company. They enable us, however humble we may be, to hold converse with the great and good of past ages and of the present time--the great philosophers, philanthropists, poets, divines, travellers. We know their thoughts, we hear their words, we clasp their hands. The chamber of the solitary student is peopled with immortal guests. He has friends who are always steadfast, who are never false, who are silent when he is weary, who go forth with him to his work, who await his return. In the literature of the world a grand society is open to all who choose to enter it.