[Illustration] Young Men WM. GUEST, F. G. S., REV. J. D. WELLS, D. D. American Tract Society New York TO GEORGE WILLIAMS, ESQ. TREASURER OF THE LONDON ASSOCIATION, AND TO THE VARIOUS MEMBERS OF THE YOUNG MEN’S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATIONS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM AND AMERICA: To you I beg to offer the four following addresses—they may be helpful in your service for young men. Thousands there are who watch your Associations with deep and grateful interest. By some persons, it may be, your aims are misunderstood. I have never learned that you condemned other literary and recreative associations; but you have felt that there was room for one distinctively Christian. You do not frown on joy and pastime; you do not disparage literary education; but you have not been ashamed to avow that your object is to save young men from irreligion, and to promote among yourselves spiritual and Christian culture. To not a few it therefore appears that not only are your associations among the very noblest, but that they preëminently meet the demand of these times. Reading-rooms and opportunities for social enjoyment are doubtless most desirable, but it is true piety that is the safety and mainspring of prosperity to a community. To the best and most distinguished men of this era it seems that the stability and progress of the great Christian nations depend upon the maintenance of Christianity in its integrity, and as honestly derived from the supernatural teaching of the New Testament Scriptures. We have, however, come upon an age of the gravest perils. What has been the spring-head and occasioner of these perils? This: Men have become estranged from intercourse with God, and from the thoughts of the holy and spiritual world. No longer living in believing relation to the Father of their spirits, they have lost the light whereby all things become luminous and harmonized. Three errors now lay straight in their path; and to one or other of these, according to temperament, they have been drawn: materialistic worldliness, that inclines man’s whole attentions to the interests, pleasures, and gains of the world of sense; scientific atheism, whereby a small minority, happily, of scientific expounders attempt to bow God out of his universe, and to resolve all creation into spontaneous life and self-development; intellectual rationalism, that makes man his own savior, denies sin and atonement, moral weakness and Divine grace. It would appear as if Satan’s last and deadliest assault upon the hopes and progress of the race was to be the denial of the self-existent God. Assuredly, let the control of this belief go, and this vital consciousness be lost, and the wide floodgates of iniquity and of lawlessness will be opened, and nothing can save millions from relapsing into barbarism. Even Mr. Buckle has taught that a materialistic