The exhortation of the text is, "Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong." And this is the message that I bring to you, who are here this morning, and to the members of our race all over the country. We must be watchful; we must hold firmly to our faith in our citizenship, and in our rights as citizens; and we must act the part of men in the maintenance of those rights. In the end the victory is sure to be ours. The right is bound, sooner or later, to triumph. "Before the monstrous wrong he sits him down-- One man against a stone-walled city of sin. For centuries those walls have been a-building; Smooth porphyry, they slope and coldly glass The flying storm and wheeling sun. "No chinks, no crevice, lets the thinnest arrow in. He fights alone, and from the cloudy ramparts A thousand evil faces gibe and jeer him. Let him lie down and die; what is the right And where is justice in a world like this? "But by and by earth shakes herself, impatient; And down, in one great roar of ruin, crash Watch-tower and citadel and battlements. When the red dust has cleared, the lonely soldier Stands with strange thoughts beneath the friendly stars." And so, in the end, will it be with this great evil of race prejudice against which we are contending in this country, if, like the lonely soldier, we show the same earnestness, the same patient determination, the same invincible courage. A better day is coming; but we have got to help to bring it about. It isn't coming independently of our efforts, and it isn't coming by quietly, timidly, cowardly acquiescing in our wrongs. IS THE GAME WORTH THE CANDLE?[41] BY DR. JAMES E. SHEPARD _Founder and President of the National Religious Training School at Durham, N. C._ [Note 41: An address delivered before the young men of the National Religious Training School, Durham, N. C.] _Students and Friends:_ I am not unmindful of the vast opportunity that is mine as I stand before young men. The opportunity is great, but the responsibility is greater. It was the thought of the responsibility that decided me to speak on the subject, "Is the Game Worth the Candle?"; the meaning simplified being--Is the object pursued worth the price paid for its attainment. Once during an all-night ride en route for Arkansas in the latter part of the year just closed, I fell into a retrospective mood, and the scroll of the past years unfolded itself before my memory, and as I reviewed it and marked the possibilities which had passed with the years, life took on even a greater aspect than it had already possessed. I shall not discuss my life, but life with its probabilities and possibilities of power and achievement; life in its earnestness and life that is merely drifting with the tide, of no benefit to itself or to humanity. A man's life depends upon his emotions, his aspirations, his determinations.