CHAPTER X.

DANGERS OF YOUNG MEN.

"And thou mourn at the last."

I HOPE the present chapter will prove to be unnecessary. It has been my object to prevent you from doing evil, by exhibiting means and motives to do well. It is not my wish to assume the position of an alarmist. But as my reader may not have yielded assent to truth and duty, or at least may not have actually commenced a life of obedience to God; as the love of sloth, pleasure, and sin may be so great as to have resisted all the motives to knowledge, virtue, and religion drawn from a consideration of the good to be secured,it may be well, before proceeding to further particulars respecting the good which young men may do and the means of doing it, to urge some motives drawn from another source. I propose to set briefly before you the evils you may do to your self and others, by a life of irreligion and sin.

In order to appreciate the evil which it is in your power to do, it is necessary to consider the

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circumstances of responsibility in which you are placed; the physical, intellectual, social, and moral constitution with which you are endowed; the nature and amount of your obligations, as they respect yourself, your parents, your family, your Maker, civil society, the divine government, the temporal and everlasting welfare of all to whom you stand in any way related, or whom your influence can ever reach; the good which you may do, and the ultimate amount of good which you may destroy. Consider also what high authority it is which has said, "one sinner destroyeth much good."

Capacity to rise high in excellence and glory, is capacity to sink correspondently deep in ruin and perdition. The lobster has not capacity to rise much; for the same reason he has not capacity to sink much. The brute is incapable of procuring to himself, on the one hand, anything more than a few physical and transient benefits; for the same reason he is incapable of procuring to himself, on the other hand, anything more than a few physical and transient evils. Not so with man. The same capacities and opportunities which enable him to rise to the everlasting character and enjoyments of angels, enable him to sink to the everlasting character and miseries of devils. Let us then notice some of the evils which it is in your power to do to yourself and to others.

I. To yourself.

1. You can ruin your physical constitution. You can do this, even by many means which the the humble brute cannot command. You can employ your superior intellect in inventing and contriving ways to enervate your body, induce incurable disease, and conduct you through a course of severe sufferings to an early grave. Some of the most intense physical sufferings which I ever witnessed, were those which a young man brought upon himself by sensual vices. Many a young man has, in a very short time, inconsiderately and wickedly ruined the finest constitution ever framed; so that he has either dug for himself an early grave, or compelled himself to drag out an existence so useless and miserable as to have considered death itself almost better.

2. You can ruin your pecuniary interests and prospects. By a course of indolence, inattention, waste, prodigality, amusements and pleasures in your early years, you may fatally exile yourself from all the means and hopes of ever rising from a state of abject and servile dependence. And even if you have begun and proceeded well for a season, you are not secure. It may cost a man years of toil to obtain the means of a comfortable and honorable subsistence; but a few short hours may decoy him into those improvident measures, to which that man is exposed, who "hath an evil eye," or

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"hasteth to be rich," which will reduce you to poverty and mortification for life.

This is a tal

3. You can ruin your intellect. ent committed to your keeping and culture, far more precious than all the treasures of silver and gold. You may waste it by neglect; you may enervate it by indolence and indulgence; you may derange it by excess; you may debase it by sensuality; you may rend and destroy its fine mechanism by sinful passions; and by how much higher than the brute you might rise, through a right use of your intellect, so much deeper than the brute may you sink, through the abuse of it. No ruin is more common, nor yet more disastrous, than that connected with a fallen intellect.

You may

4. You can ruin your conscience. silence its faithful admonitions; you may stifle its convictions of truth and duty; you may falsely educate it, so that it will put evil for good and good for evil; you may defile it; you may sear it, "as with a hot iron"; you may so utterly ruin its integrity and its power, as that this faithful guarIdian of virtue and advocate of the divine law will no longer disturb your sinful course, but the more you sin the less admonish you - thus leaving you unrebuked to fill up the measure of your iniquity. What earthly ruin more dreadful and hopeless, than that of a prostrated or perverted conscience!

5. You can ruin your reputation. However difficult it may be to secure a good name, it is very easy to lose it. It is of slow growth, but it may be destroyed in a day. An eminently wise man has said, a good name is rather to be chosen than great riches." Yet in a single hour, the development of a sin previously cherished and ripened in your heart, may fix a stain upon your fair name which no tears can ever wash away, no repentance remove; but which will cleave to you, like a dark stain upon your forehead, to be known and read by all men till the grave receives you from their sight. You may even render yourself an object of the universal disgust and abhorrence of the good, and of the taunt and scorn of the wicked; so that wherever you turn your eyes, you will find none to bestow upon you a single smile of complacence. How many in this condition, bitterly realizing that "without a friend the world is but a wilderness," have, in a paroxysm of desperation, committed suicide !

6. You can ruin the moral character of your affections. You may so entirely and fatally alienate your heart from God, that it will never find any delight in him or his service. You may so educate and enslave it to sin as to render prayer a burden, benevolent effort a painful task, the society of the virtuous and pious unpleasant, all religious duties disagreeable, and heaven itself a place of tor