Young men, what is the basis of your life and what is its goal? Have you digged deeply and thrown out all the waste material of follies and vice and built upon a substantial foundation of honest manhood and sterling character? If not, you are a failure. However, chords that are broken may vibrate once more; take up the angled threads again and weave another pattern. The book that will always be the best and safest guide for weaving life's pattern is the Bible,--the truest and best friend any young man can have. If you want oratory, you need not talk about Demosthenes walking along the shores of Greece with pebbles in his mouth, nor about that great American orator, Daniel Webster, but if you turn almost to the beginning of that wonderful Book and listen to the pleadings of Jacob's sons as they begged for the life of their father, it will surpass your Demosthenes or Webster in true eloquence. If you want logic, even though Aristotle may be world famous as the "father of logic," yet if you listen to the hunch-backed, red faced, crooked nosed, baldheaded Jew, Saul of Tarsus, you will find his logic stands unsurpassed in all the ages of the world. The history of four thousand years and more you will find there. You will discover the beginnings and the end of things. Reason, with her flickering torch, cannot point to any such sublime truths as are found in the Bible. Philosophy with her school stands amazed when confronted with the philosophy of the Bible. Science, itself the greatest contributor to the happiness of man, having penetrated the arcana of nature, sunk her shafts into earth's recesses, measured the heights of its massive pillars to the very pedestal of primeval granite, tracked the tornadoes, uncurtained the distant planets, and foretold the coming of the comets and the return of the eclipses, has never as yet been able to lift up a degraded man and point him to a higher path. I commend the Bible to you. No life is great unless that life is good. Each day is a life, and that day is wasted that is not filled with lofty desire, with actual achievement, that does not bring us nearer to God, nearer to our fellow-man and nearer to the things God has created. In such a plan of life will we find real and lasting happiness. God means every man to be happy. He sends us no sorrows that have not some recompense. There are two old Dutch words which have resounded through the world, "_Neen nimmer_," "No, never." The fleets of Spain heard it, and understood it fully, when they saw the sinking Dutch ships with the flags nailed to the shattered mainmast, crying "_Neen nimmer_," which indicated that they would never surrender. Will the young men who are to be the leaders, spend their hours in riotous living? No, never! Will they be false to duty? No, never! Will they shirk? No, never! Will they be disloyal to self, to home, to country, and to God? No, never!