Ambrose Shepherd

“ It is, in truth, the sorrow of finding out our limitations which, on their first acquaintance, often seem more appalling than they actually are. While youth may be saved by hope, by what is to be, middle life is often lost in the drab reality of what is. Every youth, who is not as indifferent to his possibilities as though he were nothing more than a lump of flesh, is about to become a numeral in the world. The tragedy enters when he knows himself to be what in a sense he must remain—a cipher, merely giving value to the men who do represent the numerals. ”

“ Never seek to refer your moral responsibility for actions to influences outside you. Settle it once and for good, that a thing can radically hurt you there only so far as you place yourself within its reach. Yield yourselves to the Power that can lift you by your real need, the need of regeneration, which can so change your nature that while you are free to many things that have in them the elements of temptation, you are yet too free to want them—the Power which can enable each one of us to say: "I fear no foe, because, by the help of God, I am my own friend." ”

“ How are we to explain a sentiment which is virtually a religion, having this one article for its creed: that honesty, while good as an ideal, cannot be invariably relied upon for practical concerns? How is it that so many men have to discover, when they are no longer young, that the thing which has passed from them and which they cannot recall is, after all, the one supreme value they possessed? There are many explanations of this tragedy, for tragedy it is, and not the least of them is, that so many young men have but one conception, one definition of success. ”

“ Was there no room for the man who penalizes body and soul to straining-point for words and thoughts that shall inspire and hearten men to steer their lives by the higher stars, those eternal principles of truth and right? Was there no room for a woman of the Salvation Army who is out of some hideous slum for a moment's breathing, before returning to it with a great self-renouncing life of love and healing? ”

“ I live to make history. I believe that I was sent into the world new from the fashioning hand of the Creator, and that I have a new man's work to do. If my life of faith on the Son of God seem recklessness to you, wanting in proportion and eccentric, hold your opinions for all they are worth; but you shall not influence me by your abandoned hopes, you shall not even chill me with the east wind of your selfish ethics."
These are the young men we need to-day. Strong in hope, in position, and in daring; strong in the strength which they find in their years, and the strength they put into them. ”

“ I can imagine that nothing is more pleasing in the sight of Heaven than to see uprightness only the more enlightened, quickened, and made imperative by the troubles and vicissitudes of life. Let a man keep, if he can, what he has honourably got; but if go it must, let it go rather than attempt to save it at the cost of moral integrity. Let him say: "Empty my purse if need be, but fill my soul; take my world, but spare my life; darken my circumstances, but keep bright my spiritual outlook." ”

“ Hope is that which is "at the bottom of the vase," as the ancients said, when "every other thing has gone out of it"—by which, as it has been suggested, they probably meant the human heart. "While hope trembles in expectation, faith is quiet in possession. Hope leaps out towards what will be; faith holds on to what is. Hope idealizes; faith realizes. Faith sees; hope foresees." [1] In other words, faith is apt to be content with what it has; hope ventures out to annex the wider provinces of the imagination. Faith is the prose of our religious life, hope is its poetry. ”

“ He does not believe that the many must drudge to the limit of endurance and starve their higher nature as long as the world lasts, that the few may taste the sweets of culture and opulence. He does not believe that brute force shall for ever trample splendid intelligence underfoot, or that we must always stand on the margin of the dark river of wrong, in the unfathomed depths of which lie mysteries of terror—the despair of man, the sorrow of God. ”

“ What is true of a few in the endowment of what we call genius, may be true of us all in the power of God unto salvation. When we were "made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth," the Maker of us all put a part of Himself into the mysterious substance. "Let each man," says Browning, "think himself a thought, an act, a breath of God." There is evil in our nature; but evil can mar us only so far as we allow it to become sin. It is in victory over evil that we find character and make. ”

“ Let it be a truth with you which must not be questioned, that the truest indication of nobility of character is reverence for womanhood. By the sweet and holy thoughts of your mother, by your sacred love and wishes for your sister, I would remind you of words in which the "wisdom of many buried ages lingers": "Keep innocence, keep purity, and do the thing which is right, so shalt thou be brought at the last to thine end in peace." May you watch and pray, that you yield not to temptation. ”

“ If we could do evil with impunity, if its punishment were a mere peradventure, it would mean that evil was the heart of the world. We may be profoundly thankful that wrong and suffering are cause and effect which nothing can break. Were it not so, it would mean that under skies dark and pitiless, a brutal scramble to survive would be the law, as in the animal world it is said to be the instinct. I know that many come into the world and leave it, never having had the chance to be all they might have been in more gracious circumstances. ”

“ Success is not always in hitting the things at which you aim; it is the good conscience that you are aiming only at right things. Let your success be goodness, and goodness will be your success. Leave luck to fools, and act as though it had no existence. Believe that character or manhood, without which nothing great is possible, is the content of your endowment put out to full advantage through grace and will. Believe that every man, worthy to be called a man, has in him the promise of the gradual supremacy of character over the accidents and happenings of circumstances. ”

“ The truth about others will out sooner or later; what most concerns you in the meanwhile is to know the truth about yourselves. While always trying to think fairly, and even generously about others, have you the right to think well of yourselves? "It is above all things necessary," said the late President Garfield, "that in every action I should have the good opinion of James Garfield; for to eat, and drink, and sleep, and awake with one whom you despise, though that one be yourself, is an intolerable thought, and what must it be as a life experience?" ”

“ The present, says a wise man, has always got to pay the purchase price of the past. Never let the temptation overcome you, to take a "short and shady" cut to the gratification of desire, or in the achievement of what is sought as success. Nothing in life is unrelated, and everything you do which cannot pass the bar of your higher self is not only sin, but also a blunder. It may sleep to-day, but it sleeps to wake. When you can least afford it, it will be more than awake, it will be hungry. Educate and cultivate your conscience, and never disregard its voice. ”

“ Beware of men who say to evil: "Be thou my good!" Reckon with the fact that in so far as we stand for anything in a life worth living, there are people who have the will, the wish, and the power to do us hurt.
And yet, I say again, they can hurt us vitally—mark the word vitally—only so far as we place the opportunity within their power. We have to hurt ourselves before we can be hurt by anything outside us. We have to be our own enemy to give the enemy his advantage. ”

“ Is it wrong to cultivate and indulge a habit that inevitably leads to bad results? And that is what betting does, apologize for it as you may. Putting aside for the moment any considerations about the money you can afford to lose, you cannot afford, either in your own or in the interests of the community of which you are a part, to take the moral risks that are involved in betting. It is to insult our intelligence to deny that, comprehensively speaking, the basis of betting is cupidity, and cupidity of a particularly dangerous kind. ”

“ I have admitted that there are cases where advantage falls to a man which cannot be explained by anything he deserves, or has done to win it. And the advantage, such as it is, often works untold hurt as an example. Just as the winnings of one gambler may tempt a hundred others to their undoing, so a single case of coveted luck is apt to encourage young men to transfer their hopes of success in many directions, from law to luck. You see here and there a man who accumulates a large fortune from beginnings that look as much like pure chance as was that piece of spoiled cloth. ”

“ To go on fighting some besetting sin is only to repeat, for the most part, an experience many of us know but too well. It almost invariably ends one way. In weariness and despair we ask: "Why should we war with evil? It is more than our test, it is our fate; let us take what sweet we can before it becomes all bitter." Which is but another way of saying: "Evil, be thou my good."
Mark well, then, our next step. It is not enough to tell us that we must conquer the wrong by doing the right. ”

“ If we can think of contempt as part of the Being of God, surely this must be His feeling for much of the wrong and suffering that finds a place in the human world. It is so gratuitous, so insensate, so unnecessary. Is it not a terrible reflection upon some of us, that after the Cross has been silently teaching the world these well-nigh two thousand years, it can yet be said with some show of reason, that the two forces that keep society, as we know it, together, are the ignorance and the patience of the poor? Why should they be so long ignorant? Why should they be so chronically patient? ”

“ Human life is but a fraction of the sum of life. The tides of the mind, the music and the tumult of human waters, cannot be heard and felt in this drop of existence.
We may believe that the moral government of the world is in the hands of Him whose love and law are both the same; and we may, at the same time, have to recognize the fact, that so many suffer grievously from forces they have not called into being, and which they are almost helpless to control. ”

“ It is not the expedient of a system cunningly devised by priest, theologian, or Church. It is the grimmest, sanest, divinest thing ever set up in this human world. The Cross is symbol of the only Power that can enter the lists against selfishness, and enter to throw it. And let me plead with you to think about this: every wrong in the world has selfishness, if not for its root, yet at its root. Cast out the selfishness which is sin, and you cast out the first and the last thing that stands between us and the new heaven and the new earth. ”

“ Necessity does not humour us, and that is the reason the world owes so much to necessity. We may be very "superior" about dogmatism in theology, but well for us that dogmatism will have no such nonsense in life. It is just doing the duty that tasks us most, whatever our feeling about it, which makes the difference between the worthy and the unworthy in character; between the numerals and the ciphers in the human world. It is doing, not what we would, but as we ought which changes reluctance into interest, and the sense of futility into the joy of achievement. ”

“ That almost deserted room on the church premises tells the truth about the whole squalid business. Almost any kind of amusement, not accompanied with betting, is, to an increasing number of people, as insipid as water is to the palate of a brandy-drinker. In the case of young men the habit does two things: it gives rise to false and ruinous impressions, and it murders the soul. As touching the former, it tempts a young man to think he can get a living, and a flourishing one, without working for it—a greatly coveted science in these days. ”

“ It seems so much easier to put money in the pocket this way, than by honest toil with head or hands, or both. The notorious fact that betting strikes at the root-principle of worthy and strenuous labour, is not the least of the vicious features of this many-sided evil.
It also creates the most hopeless form of selfishness, and it grows by what it feeds on. The avarice of betting destroys the best part of us. As I have said, it kills the soul. Who, indeed, can call that which is left in the confirmed gambler, a soul! ”

“ The great Hebrew prophets, and the Supreme Teacher Himself, did not surrender this stronghold of the soul to the evil one from a shrinking which, if a man cannot conquer, he is no preacher, and still less to a mental indolence that will not seek out acceptable words through which to convey a warning. I speak as unto wise men, and submit it to your judgment whether the preacher who has to any extent the ear of young men can afford this eternal silence concerning a subject that so vitally affects character, society, and the race to which we belong. ”

“ Must my love for my neighbour include one callous enough, not only to do a thing like that, but to boast about it? Must it annex the whole low plane of such a squalid disposition? God forbid. What I hope I should hate in myself I am not asked to love in another. If a man is base and unworthy we are to recognize the fact, however ugly; we are to look the devil in him in the face, and say it is the devil. ”

“ Let us feel that whatever wrong is done to a single human being, throughout the world-wide family of man, is literally done to Jesus Christ, and we shall better understand that central Figure in the artist's picture. Let us see Christ crucified in whatever evil is done, in whatever good is left undone that we could do, and sin will become to us not a term only, not a thing to be excused and explained away, but a real and tremendous horror. We shall feel it to be what it is, a stab struck at the living heart of Jesus Christ. ”

“ Men to-day are dreaming like dreams as shone before the souls of the ancient prophets, and in the visions of men who have wrought for human progress since the first days even until now. Waking dreams of a new and diviner order of society. A state marked by righteousness, peace, and happiness for the whole people; the golden age, when man, knowing what it is in himself he ought to love, loves that in his neighbour as in himself. ”

“ He has hope, that mighty dynamic—God's pledge to the young and unspoiled soul of a coming day when all that is false and unbelieving and wicked shall be cast into the consuming fire of divine holiness. He has faith in the great day of the Lord; and with the splendid optimism, the hope peculiar to his years, he cries: "I can, and I will, hasten the coming of my Lord." This is one great element of a young man's strength—hope in goodness, which goes so far to sustain the toil that can realize it. "I have written unto you, young men, because ye are strong." ”