Now do not brush all this away to-day, or any day, light-heartedly, as it can be so easily brushed away. “Oh, don’t shadow our lives,” you will say, “with your denials and your prohibitions and your restraints. Leave life free and sweet as the summer air and the flowers of the field”――that last how long? No, my friends, it were well for us that we should learn this lesson, and learn it now, ere the time comes when the silver cord is loosed and the wheel is broken at the cistern and the grinders cease and the long shadows fall. You remember a tragic incident in New York a few years ago――I do not need to recall the details of it――when two young lives made shipwreck of themselves just because they thought that impulse and caprice were the free voices that they might obey. When it was all over, and the two lives had drawn the veil of night across their short-lived evil joy, one of the papers published a letter which the girl had written to a friend: “My friend,” she wrote, “you and I and Fred, young, heedless, cynical, living in this reckless town of New York, may laugh sometimes at the old things like law and religion, when they say, ‘Thou shalt not.’ We may think that phrase was written for old fogies, and we may sneer at ‘the wages of sin is death’; but, my friend, there comes to us some time knowledge that the law and religion are right. What they say we shall not do, we cannot do without suffering. Fred and I have learned that. The wages of sin is death.” It is worse than death; for what was Hell in that great vision that John saw? Why, nothing but the removal of all restraint. “He which is filthy, let him be filthy still.” He is unclean, let him be unclean. He is unholy, let him be unholy. Take all the restraints away. That is Hell. Away from the dark gates that open thither may another voice call us here to-day, the clear, strong, summoning voice of Him Who said of Himself: “I came not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me. I do always those things that please my Father,” and Who in the garden of Gethsemane, when the anguish was almost greater than He could bear, yet found rest when He prayed, “Father, not my will, but thine be done”; that out of the willfulness and capriciousness and the whim and mood of our little self-indulgent lives we may pass into the great, strong, steadfast, sovereign will that waits for us; that we may stand fast and be strong in the strength and chastening of God! Now I have put it――this matter of our need of discipline――in the most personal and individual way, but it is our great national and corporate need. The body of a nation can only exist through the ordered discipline of its members and the spirit of a nation like the spirit of a man needs to be cleansed of all the lusts of willfulness and self-indulgence. The spirit of our American nation needs such cleansing. Mr. Kipling has drawn us his picture of it: