The Young American Christian

““Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong.”

We live at a time when our ears have again become familiar with reports of warfare. It is easy therefore for us to imagine a general surveying his forces as they disembark from their transports upon a foreign shore. If now we should suppose him, as commanders are wont to do, about to harangu.e his troops, what would suggest itself as his most welcome mode of address? Shall he say to them, “Soldiers, I rejoice to inform you that you are about to experience no struggles nor bloodshed; no battle awaits you; all enemies have vanished from the land.” Assuredly not, you reply. This were to insult their valour and mock their expectations. It is

* ITew York, January 28, 1855.

for conflict that the soldier girds himself; and especially to youthful enterprise and courage there is invitation in the sound of the trumpet, and incitement in the call to arms. Nor can the Christian combatant go through his campaign without hardship and blows. The Apostle Paul therefore addresses youthful Timothy thus: “Thou therefore endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ;” or thus: “Tight the good fight of faith, lay hold on eternal life, whereunto thou art called, and hast witnessed a good profession before many witnesses; “or thus:” Thou therefore, my son, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus.” All these are warnings of that opposition, contest, and difficult struggle which fall to the lot of the believer, and for which much force of resistance and assault is required. In the text this idea is manifestly present, and the Christian warrior is addressed in terms which sound of the camp and the army: “Watch ye,” be awake, on your guard; vigilantly looking out for the enemy, armed at every point, prepared against every surprise, sensible of your danger and your weakness, and forewarned against your malignant and insidious enemy. “Stand fast in the faith; “know the truth, believe it, believe it strongly; chng to it, against all ridicule, loss, and persecution; be firm and constant in adherence to Christ, the great object of faith, and source of power.” Quit you like men; “the result of vigilance and assured faith; act the manly part. Thus Joab said to his party on a noted occasion: “Be of good courage, and let us play the men for our people, and for the cities of our God,” 2 Sam. X. 12. Exhibit the high intrepid bearing which becomes Christians, acting in the name and for the honour of their Redeemer and King. “Be strong;” go out to this warfare with full confidence in divine aid; be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might; be stout-hearted and valiant, and by this be successful and victorious.

The topic seems peculiarly suitable to young Christians; and for their sakes I would deduce from these words the value of an earnest, manly and courageous

CHRISTIANITY.

As in Christ Jesus there is neither male nor female, the subject belongs not only to Christian men but to Christian women; yet as I appear before a society of young men, and as in all aggressive movements it is they who must take the lead, the remarks which follow shall be directed towards the consideration of this vigorous religion as existing in young men. Reasons will appear in the sequel, why we may lawfully single out such a portion of the race as that which, speaking in general terms, is destined to survive; and why we are justified in still further narrowing the field, by addressing our admonitions primarily to those who profess the faith of Christ, as the class contemplated by the text, and as that which must be the source of influence to its coevals.

If we might have all wishes in one, we could wish nothing better, nothing greater, than that the youth now growing up should be cast into the right mould. A present generation, duly trained in boyhood and adolescence, will make a coming generation of men, (I wish our otherwise rich English had two words, as most other languages have, to express the thought,) of men, who shall stand in the battle. Of poor sauntering triflers, in human shape and men’s apparel, we have enough; of literary Sybarites, bred on stories, fugitive poetry and monthly magazines; of minute scholars, glorying in the niceties of metre and accent, college honours, and other tongues; of dressed creatures that sweeten soirees and playhouses with their odours; of things that flutter and die in the light of fashion, as moths about a lamp; of religious professors that almost ask leave to serve Christ of the sons of Belial who surround them; more than enough have we of such young Americans, aping every effete custom and appropriating every fungous abuse of the old countries, and spoiled tenfold worse by every voyage and travel abroad, so that they blush at the marks of an American as much as their fathers would have gloried in the same; more than enough of young men whose everlasting discourse is of the last amusement or the last scandal. But of MEN, spirits in earnest, souls that have an aim, bent towards some object, and that a great one; bearing and doing, training themselves by toil, by temperance, by self-denial, by prayer, for the benefit of the greatest number, it must be confessed with lamentation that we have but few. And if, as we suppose, the times which are coming on the earth will demand such men, strong to do and strong to suffer, our only mode of providing them is to deal with the young, and to pour the plastic masses into the shaping mould.

Our Saviour long smce taught us that the children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light. Worldly governments, cabinets and and war-bureaus are wiser and more provident than the church. The great contemporary drama in the Crimea teaches us a hundred mighty lessons; and I marel, that at such a time there should be people empty and heartless enough to crave, in vulgar playhouses, the excitement or diversion of stale mimicry, mouthed by despicable players whom they would refuse admittance at their doors, or the provocative displays of semi-nude dances, at which a Roman matron would have blushed ’ celestial rosy red;’ at such a time, I say, when great tragic actions of. real life and real death are held forth to view in that more than Trojan peril and endurance imder the walls of Sebastopol. Go thither, ye poor effeminate drawing-room Christians, ye carpet-knights of a chivalry whose sword is lath and whose shield is pasteboard; go and learn what men can do and dare, when they are warmed by a grand motive. Behold them bleeding in the charge, behold them, harder yet, languishing to death in the wet and fatal trenches. On either side, see the fruits of true manly valour. What assault will they not venture, what privation will they not endure? “Now they do it to obtain a corruptible crown, but we an incorruptible.” Our own American youth, we know, would do the like in any cause which interested them, that is, in any earthly cause. In a single hom% if our city were invaded, thousands of such as hear me would rally to any call of the country; and however unprepared by training, abstinence, and discipline, would do their best and die in doing it. But stm the inquiry returns, why these and similar displays of manly virtue and self-sacrifice are so much limited to earthly hazards and conflicts? Why should the children of this world still put to shame the children of light? Why do we seldom behold a phalanx of trained Christians going forth, stately and irresistible, to the help of the Lord against the mighty? Are there no great interests at stake? Have we nothing as potent to stir the blood as the taking of a redoubt or the silencing of a battery? Can the great passions be moved only by reven*ge, bloodshed, crime? Ah, no, my hearers. History can show, even though experience should be dumb; history can show that there have been days when the Christian host was animated by a fire such as never had its equal in conquering armies. The principles of the faith have a stimulating and emboldening power, which, as you well know, was in past ages irresistible in the view of Gentile and afterwards of Antichristian foes. Just recall, for a moment, the earliest progress of Christianity, and consider what sort of men were engaged in that army. Only close students of church history do justice to the rapidity of this conquest. From Jerusalem, Antioch, Corinth, Alexandria, and Rome, as bases of operation, the hosts went forth almost simultaneously to the frontiers of the known world. The celerity of Alexander’s famous marches was outstripped by Apostles of whom no record exists, who carried the cross into realms of whose myriad converts no registers remain. There is this in which the sacramental host differs from other armies; every soldier feels the genuine impulse. The Russian, French, or British private, though drilled to a mechanical exactness of evolution and practice, and hardened to a bulldog ferocity, may partake little individually of those patriotic, ambitious or dutiful sentiments which glow in the soul of great leaders. But in the church miUtant every missionary and every confessor and every martyr was individually able to give a reason of the hope that was in him; and when the Greek slave or the Roman

boy or the Hebrew maid was brought before proconsuls and princes, they were as clear in their testimony of what they suffered for, even if not so able to argue on it, as a Paul or an ApoHos. It will never do to ascribe the unmanly supineness and apathy of many Christian young men of our times, to any want of animating sentiment in Christianity.

If the Reformation did no more, it taught us, that among the cinders of that old altar there lay coals of fire which needed but the stirring and the heavenly breath, to make them flame up to heaven. All the stories of romance wither and seem insipid when compared with Reformation history. You cannot read an hour about Luther, Calvin, Zwingle, Melancthon, Knox, or Melvill, without feeling that you are communing with men. They had something to live for. They had some principles to die for. There were doctrines at stake. It is a symptom of the wretched, flaccid, pulseless condition of sundry in our day, that they never speak of theology, of catechisms, of doctrinal sermons, but with a sneer. The religion which they would like, if indeed they have thought enough to know their own mind, would be all sentimentality and all softness. Their weakened mental organs reject the strong meat. Know ye, O my beloved young friends, that manly bone, sinew and muscle, do not form themselves on the emollient regimen of a Christianity without doctrine. The men who of old went to the stake, went for doctrines ;. these doctrines they had learnt in the Scriptures, elaborated in meditation, methodized in system, preached to hstening thousands, digested in the succinct formulas of definition, and left for us, their children, in those permanent crystals of the Reformed Catechisms, which are scoffed at by amiable wits and religious petit maitres. Men, mew; who can stand fast in the faith, who can stand alone, who have vertebral columns, who can bear, who can forbear, who can advance, who on due summons can strike, men armed with the armour of righteousness on the right hand and on the left, that is, with sword and shield, are bred in great study of God’s Word, and great famiharity with those high evangelic truths which are the motive powers of the spiritual universe. And this partly answers the question we have raised about the paucity of Christian soldiers, who seem to be in earnest, as earthly soldiers are in earnest. So that the way is prepared for stating two great means of promoting Christian courage and strength.

I. The source of manly earnestness is truth believed. It is so in trade, agriculture, mechanics, and warfare; why should it be less so in religion? The crying sin of our young men in the church is voluntary ignorance; ignorance of theological truth in its definite expression and just connexion. How can they hope the fire to bum, when they will not take the time or trouble to lay on fuel? The most intense heat, and consequently the most powerful action, proceed from deep inward conviction of religious truth, derived from laborious study of the Scripture.

I foresee your reply: you have no time. The age is so active, city engagements are so numerous, in a word, you are so busy, that you cannot improve your minds. Now, if this were a sound answer, we might dismiss you at once as hopeless, and say, we expect from you nothing great, nothing steadfast, since all that is elevated and memorable results from improvement of the mind. But this is altogether an evasion. No man who is not a slave is too busy ‘to make himself a thorough religious scholar, that is, to lay up within him the formative elements of manly power. Your engagements, we will suppose, are very great; but are you more busy than David, who had a kingdom on his hands, which he successfully guided in war and peace, and yet found time to meditate on Scripture, and contribute some noble parts towards its completion? Are you more busy than Paul, a traveller by land and sea, a preacher, author and apostle, whose entire life was a series of lofty deeds and heroic sufferings; and who yet was deeply conversant with the Bible? Are you more busy than Martin Luther, who preached almost daily, whose correspondence equalled that of a minister of state, and whose published books almost make a library of themselves; yet who daily and profoundly pondered on the Word of Inspiration? Nay, there have been men in every calling and profession, including your own, who amidst full and prosperous worldly employment, have redeemed hours to work the mine of Holy Learning. Bacon, Grotius, Sir Isaac Newton, and Chief Justice Hale, may show what philosophers and statesmen have been able to bestow on the sacred records. The truth, drawn out of the Scriptures and made the matter of Uvely faith, is that which wakes up and fortifies the character. And the cause of prevailing frivolity, vacillation and inefficiency, among certain well-disposed young persons, is, that there is nothing which they can be said to believe with all the heart. We may smile at the Commonwealth-man and the Scots Covenanter, for the sourness of their visages; but those stern dark faces showed like lanterns from the

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torch of conviction within; and mighty faith gave them earnestness of heart and strength of arm. One secret of their fortitude and energy and daring is fomid in the pocket Bible which each of them carried to the field, which he rehgiously read in camp, and which was often found next the heart when his dead body was carried from the field. The Book of God, when it is the one book, makes strong characters. Read it, study it, ponder over it; be not content, my young friends, to go over so much daily as a task, or to snatch a passage in the hurry of an odd moment; but lay yourself out to accomphsh a thorough investigation of its contents, to acquaint yourself with its order, structure and harmony, to grapple with its difiiculties, to systematize its truths, and to enrich your memory with its golden sentences. This is possible, seeing it is but one volume. Thousands have done so, and amidst difficulties as numerous and pressing as yours. Hundreds of Scottish peasants and day-labourers are at this very moment well instructed scribes unto the kingdom of God. And it vnR be a happy day for our American churches, when young persons of both sexes shall place the study of the Bible at the very head of all their intellectual pursuits. Then shall we see a race, able as well as willing to cope with the wily Jesuit and confound the boasting Atheist. Then shall that life and buoyant activity, which the vital current of holy truth keeps up, manifest themselves in the very portion of society where improvement is most hopeful.

II. If we look again for some solution of our mortifying problem, we shall find another cause of the tameness, irresolution and flight of our common re-Hgious combatants, in the want of devotional habits. True manly strength in religion is nurtured at the mercy-seat and at the foot of the Cross. The appearance of zeal may be put on for a little while, but permanent vigour must have a perennial source; and the spring-head must be within. No external activity, though pushed to the utmost, can make up for the want of closet devotion. This is just the point, where the electric attachment with heaven is effected. Here the fire comes down from above. If we would learn how Ehjah, Daniel, Paul, Augustine, Luther, Whitefield, Martyn, Payson, and Judson, came to quit themselves like men, we must accompany them to their wrestUng prayers. Nor are ministers of the Gospel alone to be imitated; scholars, soldiers, merchants, have learnt this secret of strength, and have thus found a treasury of courage, hope, and success, which the world never suspected. My beloved young brethren, the world has already half-destroyed us, when we are too busy to pray. Better forego food or rest, especially better forego any amount of profit, than learn to live without communion with God in devotion. Let the Mohammedan muezzin, from his tower beside the mosque, penetrate our conscience, when he cries aloud, at daybreak, through all the lands of Islam, JPrayer is better than sleep! Frayer is better than sleep I

But the great matter to be pressed is unconnected with prescribed times or forms; and the great question to be asked is, Do I habitually maintain a confidential intercourse with my Lord and Redeemer in acts of heavenly communion? If yea, then the channel of strengthening influences being open, there will infallibly be boldness and sufficiency for the conflict of life. If nay, weakness, inconsistency, and defeat must ensue.

The reason why the two things just mentioned promote manly strength in the Christian character, is that by the word of God and prayer, more than by all other ordinary means, we maintain conscious union with God, the fountain of all power. Here we perceive the connexion between an inward spiritual piety and an outward aggression and triumph. No longer need we dissever the contemplative and the active, in life; one is the source of the other. When some mighty cataract bursts over its wall of mountain-rock, we are not to forget that the flood has been gathering force and volume in a long preceding flow. So also the visible activity of an enterprising Christian is to be traced to months and years of secret converse with God.

The more the balance is disturbed by worldly excitement and external bustle in the daily calling, the more there is need of this preponderating weight of home-rehgion and closet-quietude, to regulate the otherwise jarring motions, like the fly-wheel or the governor in an engine. The recluse student and the sedentary woman require this peculiar discipline of silence and shade far less than the man of business, who from morning till night scarcely redeems a moment for stated reflection. He must, by stern resolution and self-denial, gain some hour to hear God speak, and to speak to God, or he will inevitably shrink and wither down mto the every-day worldly professor; who is bold at a bargain and cowardly in faith; earnest on week-days and half asleep on the Sabbath; indefatigable in trade-labours an3 unheard-of in operations for Christ’s kingdom or his poor; hot upon ‘Change and ice-cold in Church.

But the subject is too awful for satire.. We need, in degrees beyond all power of expression we need, men Tvdth blood in their hearts, who shall be as courageous, as unflinching, as diligent, and as hopeful in the concerns of God, as hundreds are daily seen to be in the concerns of the world. We need not pause to show how immediate would be the effect on Christians and on society, if a general outburst of such zeal and effort should be witnessed in our day. And therefore we may at once proceed to the important truth, that the only hope of such an event must be founded on the increase of manly piety in the young. Unless those who are now ductile can take the image and superscription of such an earnestness, the next generation will be no stronger or nobler than the present. Mournful as the declaration is, it is not to be disguised, that we who, in our march, have turned the crest of life, and whose journey is westward and down the hill, have already taken our habit and character. We may regret the past, but changes for the better, though possible through grace, are not likely to be numerous or remarkable. And then, our career is chiefly run, and all that remains must take much of its colour from the good or evil of our better days. Strength of manly Christianity for the time that is coming must have its foundations laid in the youth of the present time. In this view of the subject, it is pleasant to consider that we of the more aged party are the minority, and our number is lessening very rapidly; while you, young men, are numerous, a reinforcement fresh and vigorous, ready to step into our places. May God grant you grace to wage this warfare more valiantly and successfully than we have done! Our best hopes for the Church of the future, under God, is in what we descry of promise in young Christians. Unless we depend on miracle and supernatural intervention, the progress of religion for the next twenty or thirty years will be according to the knowledge, piety and ardour of the youthful levies into our grand army. And this ought to be a powerful inducement to every ingenuous and public-spirited young man, whatever may be his vocation, to aim at a higher measure of devotion and love, than he has been accustomed to see in his companions.

Consider what kind of Christian character and conduct must be demanded by the period about to dawn. Deliberately ask yourselves, is not manly earnestness in Christ’s cause especially required for the times which are coming upon the earth? “Watch ye,” says the text. It is a word of command, as when a guard is turned out; the mihtary order to keep awake, because dangers are imminent and foes are expected. Watch TE. It calls the young men of America to mount the walls and reconnoitre the field. And no one who has at all kept abreast of the signs of the times can give a glance toward the future, without starting up aroused and earnest at the probabihties of trying times and new emergencies, which will call for stout hearts and strong hands. The combination of omens during a few years naturally leads reflective patriots and Christians to search afresh into the prophetic oracles; and both Providence and the Word teach us to await a period in which a robust Christianity shall have all its nerve brought to the test. Wo to the young man who goes up to this battle with weak and sickly habit, with slender faith and with waning love! On what side can we look, without recognising the tokens of approaching commotion? We thought, in our simplicity, that wars were almost obsolete; but the gathering tread of the ten thousands in the Tauric peninsula, and the dead by disease and sword, correct our mistake. The tides of our own American politics no longer run smooth; and the controversies are as novel as they are momentous, so that we know not even at home what a day may bring forth. Elements stir in our bosom which may be thrown out with volcanic eruption on any one of several questions, domestic and foreign. Then we are not so far from the old hemisphere as once we were. Directly or indirectly, the present European, or more truly Eastern war, may, as a remote consequence, involve our own national peace. Nay, a revolution in remote Asia may prove very soon to be not merely between Chinese and Mantchou, or between autocracy and revolt, but between error and truth, between BeUal and Christ, between persecuting outlawry of missions and the unexampled diffusion of the Gospel in that vast empire. An earnest mind will also pray for triple strength and triple manhood, in considering the fortunes of Rome, and the probable contest between America and the Pope. Wars and rumours of wars will possibly be accompanied or followed, in some lands, by infidel and popish persecutions; and so the sons of those present will need to be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might. Different as our interpretations of prophecy and our prognostications may be, there is, I suppose, no one among us, who looks for a quiet time, halcyon days, an Augustan age of art and letters and gentle luxury, for our immediate descendants. No prophet am I; but when I look intently on my sons, and on you my dear young parishioners, I seem to myself like one who hears and sees tokens of a sifting, and a shaking, and a suffering dispensation. “I am pained,” cried Jeremiah to an incredulous people; “I am pained at my very heart: my heart maketh a noise in me; I cannot hold my peace, because thou hast heard, 0 my soul, the sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war!” And we also, in the midst of subterranean concussions and trumpet calls, think of possible convulsions and trials of fortitude, and desire for those who come after us a Christianity in earnest.

Bejvien, therefore, in knowledge, in faith, in self-denial, in endurance, in effort, in diligence, in perseverance, in love. Or to comprehend it in a word, “Be ye holy.” That which contributes to your inward piety will secure your strength. As has been already said, no increase of outward labour, no pragmatical hurrying from toil to toil, no forwardness of mere act, no almsgiving or other beneficence, will certainly make you mighty men of God. All these may exist where grace is low or even absent. But devoted attention to the Word and prayer will do it; faith and vigilance and love will do it; communion with a dying Saviour will do it; the “unction from the Holy One’’ will do it. Let me vehemently exhort you to seek a Christian experience higher, broader and deeper than we, your predecessors and teachers, have exhibited; or than you observe in the religious world around you. Eor if Christ intends great blessings for the next age, it is likely that he will pour a three-fold anointing on the young men of this. Happy shall be the Evangelist of that period, a period thus resembling the primitive and apostolical days, who shall feel free to say; “I write unto you, young men, because ye have overcome the wicked one; I have written unto you, young men, because ye are strong, and the Word of God abideth in you, and ye have overcoQie the wicked one.” 1 John ii. 13, 14.