2. The remembrance of God should inspire youth with a sense of its responsibility and opportunity. The French have a saying, " If youth but knew and age had power." It is almost a proverb, so deep and full of wisdom is its sad truth. If youth but knew that youth is their spring ! If youth but knew that they are shaping the future ! If youth but knew that it has opportunities that will never come again ! Memory is in a peculiar sense the faculty of youth ; and it is a wise contrivance of Him who formed us, that on our setting out in life we should be furnished with the means of laying in those stores of knowledge which we shall have to draw upon in future years. Youth is the time to make those impressions upon the mind, and to paint those scenes upon the imagination, which the eye of the soul will survey in after life, when it contemplates the objects and images which surround it in the world within.
^ I love above all other reading the early letters of men of genius. In that struggling, hoping, confident time the world has not slipped in with its odious consciousness, its vulgar claim of confidantship, between them and their inspiration. In reading these letters I can recall my former self, full of an aspiration which had not learned how hard the hills of life are to climb, but thought rather to alight down upon them from its winged vantage-ground. Whose fulfilment has ever come nigh the glorious greatness of his yet never-balked youth? As we grow older, art becomes
^ Life and Letters of Brooke Foss Wcstcott, ii. 293.
424 TIMELY REMEMBRANCE
to us a definite faculty, instead of a boundless sense of power. Then we felt the wings burst from our shoulders; they were a gift and a triumph, and a bare flutter from twig to twig seemed aquiline to us; but now our vans, though broader grown and stronger, are matters of every day. We may reach our Promised Land ; but it is far behind us in the Wilderness, in the early time of struggle, that we have our Sinais and our personal talk with God in the bush.^
(1) It is in youth that we have the power to remember our Creator. — Our knowledge of God afterwards is ever tending to be of a different kind — a knowledge without love — in which our reason seems to go beyond our feelings, which does not interweave itself in our nature, and is certainly not, to the same degree, capable of moulding us to His will. In a few years we shall no more be able to make a free offering of our hearts to Him. We shall bring Him the waste of our power, the wreck of our lives. The world will have caught us in its toils ; those natural gifts which seem in themselves not far from the Kingdom of Heaven will have passed away and been lost to us ; the goods of this life will place themselves between us and heaven. If we ever looked up- wards with any earnest thought or wish, if we ever remember to have felt assured in past times of a blessedness on those who believed, let us hold fast this thought, let us recall this image, because the time of promise is short and the evil days will soon come.
^ The period of gloom began with Newman's enforced resigna- tion of the editorship of the Rambler in 1859 and lasted till Kingsley's attack on him in 1864. It was undoubtedly aggra- vated by a touch of morbidness brought on by ill-health. His state of mind in those years is recorded in a journal which he began to keep at this time — one of the literary treasures he has left — written as in the sight of God, with an utter simplicity and sincerity. The first entry [dated Dec. 15th, 1859] was written shortly after his failure as editor of the Ramller. " I know perfectly well, and thankfully confess to Thee, 0 my God, that Thy wonderful grace turned me right round when I was more like a devil than a wicked boy, at the age of fifteen, and gave me what by Thy continual aids I never lost. Thou didst change my heart, and in part my whole mental complexion at that time, and I never should have had the thought of such prayers as those which
' Jjetters of James Russell J^owell, i. 154f
ECCLESIASTES xii. i 425
I have been speaking of above but for that great work of Thine in my boyhood. Still those prayers were immediately prompted, as I think, in great measure by natural rashness, generosity, cheerful- ness, sanguine temperament, and unselfishness, though not, I trust, without Thy grace. I trust they were good and pleasing to Thee, — but I much doubt if I, my present self, just as I am, were set down in those past years, 1820 or 1822 or 1829, if they could be brought back, whether I now should make those good prayers and bold resolves, imless, that is, I had some vast and extraordinary grant of grace from Thy Heavenly treasure-house. And that, I repeat, because I think, as death comes on, his cold breath is felt on soul as on body, and that, viewed naturally, my soul is half dead now, whereas then it was in the freshness and fervour of youth. And this may be the ground of the grave warning of the inspired writer, ' Memento Creatoris tui in diebus juventutis tuae, antequam veniat tempus afQictionis . . . antequam tenebrescat sol/ " etc.^