Let me say a word here about circumstances, which will seem to contradict some things you will find in this book, if you have interest enough in it to read it through. A Glasgow minister some time ago made a stand against a considerable minority in his church over some matter that, as he said, involved a principle for which he should fight. It cost him many of his more wealthy members and adherents. "Not many of us," I said to him after, "have your courage to take so serious a risk." "Nor should I have had it," he answered, "had I not means that make me independent of my salary." It was a candid admission, and it reaches a long way. The strength of this man was in his position quite as much as in himself; and this is probably true of the great average of us. Circumstances may mean possibilities, more often than possibilities mean, or create, circumstances. What we can do is not only determined by what we bring into the world, but by what we find when we get here. Give, then, whatever courage is native to you its full purchase, by whatever favour you have in circumstances. It is here the young man has a great advantage; he is at an age when he can afford risks; let him use it before his years are mortgaged by other demands. In public life he can base his efforts on the fact that there are tremendous evils that need resistance, that there are sacred causes which need assistance. He can afford, as never again, to close with the truth that there is a corporate life, a public virtue, a humanity of the body politic, with laws, responsibilities, and duties. In social life he can refuse to bow to an arbitrary and often empty fashion, or to immolate himself on the altar of mammon. He can be a living protest against the tyranny and lust of money, which are eating away the heart and destroying the soul of Christendom. He can stand for the sane and rational ideas and habits of life, without which society but personifies the unscrupulous and vulgar parvenu. And in religion he can accept the teaching and obey the commands of Christ without any overwhelming temptation to escape them behind some exegetical device or the plea of expediency. He can devote the rose bloom of his years to great principles, before he has had time to catch the infection of a commonplace belief in God. He can be a soldier of the Cross, and have himself placed in the forefront of the battle. He can go down into the pit to rescue the perishing, and take daring, awful risks for the Captain of his salvation and the race of which he forms a part. I have written unto you, young men, because you can afford to be strong.