Young men may enjoy the confidence of their employers while they are disqualifying themselves for independent action. Devotion to their interests may secure rapid advancement in positions and salaries. They may be extravagant and immoral, and yet have qualities that cover their faults and commend them to favor. While they remain under the direction and control of men better and stronger than themselves they may be congratulated as already successful, while they are bearing about in their own persons all the conditions of sure and disastrous failure. The first and fundamental condition of real and permanent success is good character. This may be set down without qualification. Character is an engraving. A good character answers to a divine ideal or pattern. It is not made in a day, and if marred it can be restored. Bearing the deep cuts and finer lines of truth and righteousness and pureness, it will bear the violence of temptation in private, social, and business life, and the severer testing of the last day. Of course such a character is secretly and openly religious. Only when young men consent to commit the keeping of their souls and bodies to Jesus Christ, and to bear any cross that in his love and faithfulness he may lay upon them, can they be strong in the Lord and the power of his might. How suggestive the words of the disciple whom Jesus loved with a peculiar personal affection: “I have written unto you, young men, because ye are strong, and the word of God abideth in you, and ye have overcome the wicked one. Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world.” I hope no young man searching for the conditions of success in his business life, if he reads these pages, will make light of this, which is first and most important of all. That cannot be called success which secures more than heart can wish for the life that now is, and not the life to come. “Look well to thy goings,” was the earnest counsel of one who knew well the dangers of the young man. “Look well to thy goings; it is a narrow path. Look well to thy goings; it is a new path. Look well to thy goings; it is a slippery path. Look well to thy goings; it is an eventful path.” In a long life I have seen many young men begin a business career with great advantages and brilliant prospects, but their light went out in darkness because they did not cleanse their ways by taking heed thereto according to God’s word.