“Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way? Even by ruling himself
after Thy word.” The question of questions this, at the most critical
time in his life for every child of Adam who ever grew to manhood on
the face of our planet; and so far as human experience has yet gone,
the answer of answers. Other answers have been, indeed, forthcoming at
all times, and never surely in greater number or stranger guise than
at the present time: “Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way?”
Even by ruling himself in the faith “that human life will become more
beautiful and more noble in the future than in the past.” This will
be found enough “to stimulate the forces of the will, and purify the
soul from base passion” urge, with a zeal and ability of which every
Christian must desire to speak with deep respect, more than one school
of our nineteenth century moralists.
“Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way?” Even by ruling
himself on the faith “that it is probable that God exists, and that
death is not the end of life;” or again, “that this is the only
world of which we have any knowledge at all.” Either of these creeds,
says the philosopher of the clubs, if held distinctly as a dogma and
consistently acted on, will be found “capable of producing results
on an astonishing scale.” So one would think, but scarcely in the
direction of personal holiness, or energy. Meantime, the answer of
the Hebrew psalmist, three thousand years old, or thereabouts, has
gone straight to the heart of many generations, and I take it will
scarcely care to make way for any solution likely to occur to modern
science or philosophy. Yes, he who has the word of the living God to
rule himself by—who can fall back on the strength of Him who has had
the victory over the world, the flesh and the devil—may even in this
strange disjointed time of ours carry his manhood pure and unsullied
through the death-grips to which he must come with “the lust of the
flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life.” He who will take
the world, the flesh, and the devil by the throat in his own strength,
will find them shrewd wrestlers. Well for him if he escape with the
stain of the falls which he is too sure to get, and can rise up still a
man, though beaten and shamed, to meet the same foes in new shapes in
his later years. New shapes, and ever more vile, as the years run on:
“Three sorts of men my soul hateth,” says the son of Sirach, “a poor
man that is proud, a rich man that is a liar, and an old adulterer that
doateth.”
We may believe the Gospel history to be a fable, but who amongst
us can deny the fact that each son of man has to go forth into the
wilderness—for us “the wilderness of the wide world in an atheistic
century”—and there do battle with the tempter as soon as the whisper
has come in his ear: “Thou too art a man; eat freely. All these things
will I give thee.”