“how beautiful is youth! how bright it gleams.

with its illusions, aspirations, dreams!

book of beginnings, story without end,

each maid a heroine, and each man a friend!

aladdin’s lamp, and fortunatus’ purse!

that holds the treasures of the universe!

all possibilities are in its hands,

no danger daunts it and no foe withstands;

in its sublime audacity of faith,

‘be thou removed,’ it to the mountain saith,

and with ambitious feet, secure and proud,

ascends the ladder leaning on the cloud.”

—longfellow: morituri salutamus.

how to face life, how to prepare for life, are questions that must be answered by those who believe, as lecky put it, 10that the “map of life” must be marked out, that in the words of emerson there is such a thing as the “conduct of life” which man is free to determine.

we are assured incessantly in these days that we must enter upon a great programme of preparedness for war,—back of which urging lies the assumption that a maximum of preparedness must be arranged in order to secure our land against the menace of aggression or invasion. if a programme of preparedness, which in the last analysis involves destruction and desolation, be impossible without the fullest planning, how much less possible is it to shape a constructive life-upbuilding programme without most careful and adequate preparedness.

11into the mind of youth must penetrate the ideal of self-preparedness,—not of external preparation for the outward life, but of inmost preparedness for the inner life. whether or not the preparedness programme be, as some hold, more menacing to the soul of america than foreign foe can ever become because it marks an immediate invasion of the american soul rather than a possible aggression upon american soil, it is certain that life cannot worthily be lived save after preparedness in the fullest sense of the term.

it is, in truth, easy to stir up excitement and even deeper feeling over a purely external problem such as is that of war-preparedness, preparing to do something to another whether an individual 12or a nation or a continent. the easiest way is the way of external preparedness, the militaristic way, for it involves a minimum of reasoning. but preparation for life which i ask of youth involves the largest measure of reasoning and planning and purposing. it is the hardest way rather than the easiest way, though the pursuit thereof makes ultimately for the way that is inevitably rightful and unerring.

is it needful to urge upon young people that they shall face life with the determination to sketch for themselves a map of life as they see it, as they purpose, if so be they purpose, to make it? what would be said of a military commander who entered upon a land to him unknown without securing in advance 13the fullest possible data, without gaining, as far as it was possible so to do, an understanding of the outlines of the country he proposed to enter?

curiously enough, it is often imagined that preparation for life is largely a matter of the higher education and exclusively associated with college and university life. this imagining may be due to the circumstance that men and women step out of so-called preparatory schools into higher institutions of learning. one sometimes wonders, in very truth, whether, instead of college preparing men for life, it were not more fitting to hold that after the college or university experience men need to be repaired if they are rightly to live and toil and serve.

14my counsel is not for men alone but for men and women, for youth and maidens alike. let no man venture to offer two kinds of counsel, one to men and yet another to women. there is only one manner of preparedness for life, for life is life and it is not one thing for a man and yet another for a woman.

though i have used the term “map of life,” map is hardly a happy analogy. for maps presuppose that a land is become known and familiar. and life cannot be foreknown and charted, if life it is to be, as every life ought to be, a great adventure into the unknown rather than the acceptance of a programme, a hazard of the spirit rather than a body of prescriptions and ordinances. 15we are to fare forth upon the seas of life,—without chart. but some of us attempt to sail the sea rudderless, helmless, starless. men and women embark upon life without ever having given thought to the storms that beset, to the rocks that threaten, to the unknown perils that may lie before. and then it is wondered why many fail to make port, why the ships of life frequently founder upon the high seas. the wonder ought rather to be that so many enter triumphantly into the harbors of eternity, seeing how rarely men map out life in advance, seeing how grudging is the time spent upon preparation, seeing how seldom men diligently and consciously prepare to meet those difficulties and burdens and problems which 16adequate preparedness for life alone can fit the soul to face.

let not life be mapped out so definitely for you, so accurately and systematically that no room will be left for the play of your own will and the determinations of your own spirit. i would almost rather have every map of life flung away than have life so mapped out as to leave youth no freedom of choice, as to fail to spur men on to face the great adventure, to be capable of daring to front whatsoever life may offer. not very long ago, i inquired of friends, whose little lad is a pupil of one of the so-called best schools in the land, when they had applied for his admittance, and they answered, “before he was born.” it occurred to me to inquire what dire thing 17would have happened in the event of the lad having proved upon birth to be a little lass, but the comforting assurance was at once given me that such contingency, not to say calamity, had been guarded against, in a sense, through applying for admittance to a girls’ school in the event of the lad being born a lass. it seemed to me then as it does now an admirable thing to make such comprehensive provision for a child’s education as to gain for it in advance of birth admittance into two schools, irrespective of sex.

but, without resting too heavily upon this illustration, is it not possible to prepare another for life so definitely as to deny to youth the privilege of willing, choosing, venturing, daring—even losing? 18it were almost better that a youth go without the problematic advantages of school discipline than have his school and college and university career chosen and marked out for him rigidly and inflexibly. what greater wrong can i do my child than to withhold from him the freedom of choice, than so to cabin and confine his spirit that he must needs beat his wings in the intense inane without knowing the atmosphere that magnifies freedom and liberates the soul? guide if you will the life of youth, but beware of the danger of maiming and crippling life through so definitely and completely mapping it out as to deny the soul of youth the peril of adventure, the joy of combat, the glory of hopeless daring.

19life must mean pioneering, not making one’s way, but breaking a way, clearing a path of life for one’s self. it is the glory of life,—and there is no glory like unto it,—to face the task of moral and intellectual pioneering. there is danger lest in our time there pass out of the life of men one of the most precious of things, that pioneering spirit that comes to the man who after he has fared forth, braved every danger, stood every peril at bay, declares in the word of the poet:

“anybody might have heard it

but god’s whisper came to me.”

the whisper of god comes to every man or to every man it may come. the opportunity for the performance of the task of moral or spiritual pioneering is 20denied to no man. americas of the spirit remain to be discovered within the life of every one of us. what man or woman who may read this will affirm that there has never come into his life a revelation the gleam of which enables him to see that he is free to reach a great decision, that his spirit may dare a great refusal, that his soul may utter a great affirmation? the great moment of life is that in which a man is revealed unto himself, in which his soul is laid bare, in which it comes to him with the force of a revelation,—mine is the power to will and to determine the content of my life, though if i am to will i must dare to be myself, i must reach the decision, i must will, i must be free.

21and the freedom of youth means freedom to be one’s self, to be a law unto one’s self, not to be one’s self in lawlessness. choose ye this day whom ye will serve,—remembering that the responsibility of decision rests with you and that, in the despite of all the lives that have been lived and all the maps that have been drawn and all the plans that have been sketched and all the precedents that have been set, you must live your own life, and, if it be not your own life, it is not life at all. cherish the counsels of loved ones but remember that neither mother nor father, uncle nor cousin nor any kinsman or kinswoman whosoever can choose whom you are to serve. you cannot serve god unless yours be the choice.

22young men and women require to be warned against a thousand and one influences ever lurking near at hand to deter youth from the hazard of the spirit’s pioneering. despise the counsels of the over-wise and over-mature, the sum of whose low wisdom is that a man can make no graver mistake in life than to wander from the paths which all men else have pursued. the fear of seeming unusual obsesses the soul of too many of us. not a few men and women would rather be wrong than seem different. difference, variance, distinctiveness are not ends in themselves, but may become and ofttimes are the means that must be used by him who is not fearful of moral distinction.

outward differentiation is nothing, 23but inward distinction is everything,—is the counsel i ever urge upon my fellow-jews. we are not to seem different for the sake of seeming, but we are to dare to seem to be different in order to be distinguished, in order to achieve spiritual outstandingness. when nice and refined and timid people say to you, “remember to be like everybody else, don’t attempt anything new, don’t run the risk of seeming peculiar, don’t dream of venturing upon novel courses whether in things great or small,” remember that there is a possible invasion of the soul’s integrity that no man need endure. to the counsels of the timorous fling back the command to the brave: “always do what you are afraid to do.”

24when men seek to affright you by their counsels of prudence, remind them of the rule of one of the knightliest of americans, the founder of hampton institute, who laid upon one youth’s soul the burden: “doing what can’t be done is the glory of living.” and when men seek to degrade you to the level of their own base timidity, bid them to remember the courage and nobleness that were in the act of higginson in leading a negro regiment touching which he said: “we all fought, for instance, with ropes around our necks, the confederate authorities having denied to officers of colored regiments the usual privileges if taken prisoners and having required them to be treated as felons.”

pioneering, moreover, presupposes 25unrest, discontent, just as it should. i am not fearful for the youth whose soul is in a state of unrest, the youth who has soaring ideals and knows not whether life is even worth living. if that be his problem it is enough for him to know, paraphrasing the word of the jewish fathers, that whether or not life is worth living we must live as if it were and we must make life fuller of worth. are you dissatisfied, are you discontented, so much the better for you. hearing from the mother of james russell lowell of his general discontent with the conditions of society, emerson wrote to her, “i hope he will never get over it.” better the nobly discontented than the ignobly content. did not john stuart mill say that pigs 26are always satisfied and men are always dissatisfied. but let your discontent and dissatisfaction be not with the world but with yourself, knowing that if it be noble it shall lift you up.

grave consequences attend the too definite mapping out of life’s programme. men’s passion for and faith in the profession of soldiering rest upon youth’s yearning for adventure. and if, perchance, to-day great multitudes of men are yearning to take up arms, it is not because they would destroy an enemy, but because they would obliterate the emptiness of their own lives, because they are in revolt against the absence in normal life to-day of the pioneering opportunity. it is this lack of stimulus or impulse in the direction of pioneering 27which makes for poor, mean, low substitutes in the realm of adventure. the low gang takes the place of high comradeship, the debasing fling becomes a substitute for ennobling adventure. the passion for glamour and glare, as disclosed in the craze for the motion picture, is only another expression of the thwarted sense of adventure which the soul of youth dare not be denied.

seeing that the gang spirit is nothing more than a crude, imperfect, at worst sinful, expression of youth’s passion for togetherness, what needs to be done is to offer youth an opportunity for the expression of the deep yearning for fraternalism. do young men imagine that they must have their fling? is it not because life as lived is often so flat 28and stale and unprofitable that the fling of the body is substituted for the adventure of the spirit, that, failing to grasp hold of the eternal realities and verities, men set out to magnify the passing and perishable? when everything big is shut out of life it is not to be wondered at that life becomes full of meanness and littleness and unworthiness.

give yourself to something great, enroll under the banner of a high cause, choose as your own some standard of self-sacrifice, attach yourself to a movement that makes not for your own gain but for the welfare of men, and you will have come upon a richly satisfying as well as engrossing adventure. either your spirit will greatly and bravely, nobly and self-forgettingly adventure, 29or you will be in danger of yielding to the dominance of your appetites, you will be in peril of being overcome by your masterful passions. dare to give every power of your life to the furtherance of a mighty cause. let your spirit come under the dominance of a high and exalting enthusiasm. so will you gain the mastery over yourself, not as a matter of prudence, not as a matter of caution, not as a matter of timidity, not as a matter of duty.

let something so high and noble come into your life that it shall be expulsive of everything low and mean. the men one honors most, the men one has reason to cherish most highly, are those into whose lives something so lofty and commanding has come as to 30have left no room for the mean and petty. having given themselves to the furtherance of a high and exalted ideal, life leaves no place for the mean. the selfish and the unworthy retreats with the precipitancy of the coward before the imperiousness of the noble impulse, the divine aim. and to their honor be it said, young men and women will rise to the highest level when it invites or challenges. there is in the heart of youth a limitless capacity for ardent devotion to causes of nobleness if but it be evoked and guided. and youth, too, understands how noble the venturesome deed may be even when utterly futile, how sublime in essence even when broken and foredoomed.

but men cannot finely pioneer nor 31nobly adventure until after they have learned certain lessons in life. men must learn to be self-reveringly independent, which implies not the aloofness of solitude but the aloneness when necessary of moral and spiritual self-reliance. man must learn to live his own life. there is no greater danger in our time than that a man shall submit to the tyranny of the crowd. a man need not be remote from nor yet alien to the world and yet he may live his own life and live within himself. we suffer ourselves to come under the domination of mob-feeling and mob-thinking, such as it is, because we have not learned the art of shutting ourselves away at times from the world. we seem never to dare to be alone because, though we 32know it not, we would fain avoid facing life’s problems. we must understand, too, that, if the problems of our own life are to be met and solved, these things cannot be done vicariously. not parents nor teachers nor ministers can solve those pressing problems of our inner life with which a man can cope effectively only amid the solitude of his inmost life. until you have learned the art of separating yourself for some time in every day from the multitude, you will not learn how to think out and think through life’s problems. you will not even know that there are problems to be resolved.

but while life is to be lived in the spirit of self-reverence and self-reliance, life’s great questions cannot be faced 33aright unless they be faced selflessly. life is not to be egocentric but heterocentric. the question that a man must put is not what is he going to get out of life, how can he get the most out of life, but how can he put the most and the best into life. life is not to be interpreted in terms of self, of individual gain, of personal advantage. if it be possible to differentiate between two classes in the world, these classes are respectively made up of the men who read life in the language of privilege and advantage and the men who interpret life in the terms of duty and obligation and responsibility. the selfless are the only beings who know how to live, who have learned and mastered the art of life. it is always possible 34to draw the distinction between the man who lives for himself, for what he can get out of life, for the enhancement of his own fame, for the enlargement of his own power, and the man who puts himself second, who lives for the good of others, who lives for the good, who is capable of denying self. the noblest of men and women are they who prescribe life to self in terms of duty to the world.

i venture to say to youth this day that there are two great needs in the life of youth, if life is to be truly and finely faced. have an ideal, something to live by, and live for that ideal, wholly, steadfastly, unwaveringly. many men are willing to cherish an ideal, to behold a vision, to catch a 35gleam, but they do not seem to understand that ideals are not to be had cheaply, that a vision is not to be gained for the asking. one comes upon men and women in every walk of life entirely ready to pursue an ideal, but the pursuit must impose no difficulty, must involve no sacrifice. these are the idealists who falter not until sacrifice be demanded of them, and then their ideal is suffered to pass as if the ideal were nothing more than a fair-weather friend rather than a refuge in time of trouble, a bulwark during hours of trial and amid the storms of temptation.

nor are ideals reserved for the great and outstanding in life. every one of us has a goal, and you are what your goal is. your life will ultimately define 36itself in the terms of your ideal. let your ideal be high and it will exalt you. suffer your ideal to be low and it will be sure to debase you. you are your goal: your ideal is you. life often breaks down here, in one of these two critical places, in the matter of willing highly and of having holily. some men have neither vision of goal nor choice of way. some men have the vision but stumble on the way,—the men who think the goal more important than the way, forgetting that the way is the goal. and so many falter and fumble, forgetting that life’s most important choice is as truly of a path as of the goal, that the way that leads thither is of the essence of the dream and the triumph. what thou wouldst have 37highly thou must have holily. we will to have high things, but we are not prepared to achieve them holily, as if the manner of the quest were less holy than the matter of the goal.

who does not know of men in business who aim to secure a competence and are resolved to put by the ways that are sharp and mean, after a fortune has been secured? men vainly imagine that after they have amassed much they will neutralize the evil they have done by doing much good, but in the meantime they have done evil to themselves and are no longer free to live by the ideal. giving themselves unholily to the quest of the high, they have become transformed and debased into something mean and strange. one knows of men 38in the ministry to whom is given the putatively wise counsel to be discreetly cautious and evasively silent until the time comes for the occupancy of a great pulpit, when, as it is basely said, a man can afford to speak out of his soul. but when the great pulpit prize is won, the gleam, alas, is gone, the vision lies shattered. the man has been corrupted and his soul corroded and he who was willing for a time to be silent in the hope that some day, through the methods of silence, he might achieve the right of speaking out more bravely, has in the meantime become a dumb dog who has lost the power as well as the will to utter himself in fashion brave and unafraid.

seemingly good men, outwardly decent 39men enter into political life and imagine that they must for a time strike hands with corruption until the hour will come when they shall be able to smite corruption with their own fists. they palter and they falter, whispering sorrowfully, “truly it is regrettable, but one must do these things.” one distinguished statesman in american life declared to a friend many years ago that there are times when a man must eat a peck of dirt in order to gain high office. he gained the office, he ate his peck, and the tragedy is that it is not only become the steady article of his diet, but he loves it and he would not live without it, that it is become of the very essence of his being.

in other words, a man cannot wallow 40through the mire to the skies. no man can have two standards, one to be followed until he be forty or fifty, and then suddenly put away. no man can divest himself of the lower ideal which he has adopted as a temporary expedient, because in the meantime it has come to have the mastery over his soul. putting aside the great choice, the hour comes when a man finds himself incapable of the great refusal and the standard to which he gave his temporary adherence, to be abandoned in the years of opulence and safety, becomes his despotic and inescapable master. it is no more possible to have two standards in the world of the spirit than it is possible to prescribe two different moral standards for men and women. unity must 41be sought and achieved at the outset, not a lowered standard in the beginning and a higher standard in the end. the habit of the soul cannot be altered at will. once to every man and not a thousand times comes the moment to decide, and the earlier decision will in part, if not in whole, be determinative of every later choice.

and if, young men and women, there were nothing else for which to prepare, there is the future, there is the holy calling of parenthood to be pursued by most of you. have i not the right to appeal to young men and women to-day to remember how much or how little they can make of their own lives, and may we not base such appeal upon the truth that they are to be the makers and the 42molders of the morrow; that unless their lips and lives proclaim the voice of god in the soul of man, there will follow a little-souled and mean-hearted generation instead of a race of great-hearted and noble-souled men and women.

a beautiful passage in an allegory recently presented upon the stage tells of the song of unborn souls, which are dreaming of the parenthood to be their lot upon earth and looking forward with heavenly joy to the supreme felicity and benediction of parenthood. the most important duty of youth is to prepare with consciousness and consecration for life’s highest duty,—the duty of parenthood. shall that future be polluted, shall that heritage be befouled? in reminding young men and women as i do 43that they are the trustees of the morrow, that they hold in their keeping the destiny of all the future, i am tempted to ask a question. what if i were to bring a little child before you, some beautiful child of a year or two, and what if some man sitting in this company were to come hither and for some unknown reason strike that child: would it not be with difficulty that we could restrain ourselves from doing violence to such a creature? what of the men and women committing a crime infinitely more hurtful, who would not strike a little child, but who, none the less, are ready to doom unborn generations to a heritage of evil, of hurt, of shame? what young man or woman will not think upon that?

44a further word should be spoken to young women who in every generation are standard-bearers, and not only standard-bearers but standard-lifters. i know it to be true that ofttimes women conform to the lower standards which men impose upon them. yet is it true that women may be the makers of standards if they will, and that, if they consent to the lowering of the standards, men will readily and, alas, eagerly lapse to the lower levels. will not young women understand that, if they suffer standards to be lowered, if they for any reason yield to the temptation to be their poorer, unworthier selves in the sight of men, then will they corrupt men, then will they in very truth have broken 45faith with the moral order which has vested womanhood with the supreme privilege of exalting standards and by the exalting of standards exalting men.

i have said nothing up to this time about the place of god in the life of youth. i never feel it my duty to urge you to believe in god as if faith in god, as if trust in god, as if the acceptance of god were a task to be superimposed rather than a privilege to be coveted. to young men and women i would say that the one thing in the world they may not omit to do is to leave room for god in their lives. but you cannot leave room for god if your life be choked and clogged with things, and things, and things. leave a place in your life for 46the spirit of god and god will find his way into your life and lead you to the making of a life divine.

reviewing what has gone before, the great thing in life is to map it out in youth. not that one is to refrain from venturing upon the uncharted sea but that, howsoever daringly one is ready to fare forth upon the seas, one may not forget the guidance of the stars. it is a great thing to venture upon the imperiling seas of life without the assurance of safety and reward for one’s plans and toils. it is a greater thing so to fare forth as to come inevitably under the direction of the fixed stars in the heavens of the spirit divine.

upon a stained window in the dwelling of a noble friend i came upon some 47lines which i commend to the soul of youth everywhere:

“climb high

climb far

your goal the sky

your aim the star.”