Our Morals and Manners (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1872. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... OUR YOUNG MEN. "Young man, I say unto thee, Arise."--LUKE vii. 14. IT may seem something like a perversion of Scripture to urge this as Christ's appeal to the young men into whose hands these pages may fall. But it is His appeal; His explicit and emphatic charge, "Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light' There is a terrible deadness about all of us. Our manners and morals, our relations to our fellow-men, our trade life, our Church life, our State life, in spite of our vehement and restless activity, seem all wellnigh dead together, when we look at them in the light of the Great Biography, or even compare ourselves with the ages in which a living Spirit was visibly stirring the great heart of humanity, parent of heroic deeds and ministries which seem beyond our powers of production now. And yet these comparisons of the present with the past are, in one sense, illusory. Had we lived in those times which seem so grand and fair, we should have been found uttering the same regrets. It is really an ideal past with which we are always tempted to compare our present; the earthly image of that life whose vision, pure, intense, full of joyous activity and fruitfulness, comes sometimes in musing hours like a white angel into our valley of the shadow of death. We give the vision a local habitation in the ages of the past, but it is nowhere on earth; it never has been, it never will be, until the hope of the Son of man about humanity is fulfilled. Yet in point of unselfish devotion and heroic endeavour we can hardly believe that our own age stands out nobly, in the eyes of calm, impartial watchers on high, compared with ages which might be selected from the past; while, in comparison with the hopes with which the Advent filled me...