These sentiments exist in the minds of our people already; and we only need to foster them and impregnate them with a Christian element, in order to produce convictions about public duty which would have the most blessed results. We might train our people to feel keenly the woe of mankind and especially the moral blots on the fair fame of their own city or country. We might get them to cherish a high ideal of what the place of their abode should be, morally and spiritually, and of what their country might do in the world. In Scotland there was such an ideal once: the eye of the dying Covenanter saw, painted on the mist of the moorland, the vision of a consecrated land ruled by a covenanted king.[22] In England it existed once, in the Puritan days, when, as Richard Baxter says, England was like to become a land of saints, a pattern of holiness to the world, and the unmatchable paradise of the earth. You had it in America once: when your fathers landed in the _Mayflower_, they were seeking not merely meat and drink, or even wealth and plenty, but a home in which their descendants might grow up in freedom, virtue and religion. We must get that ideal back again, if, in spite of railroads and industrial armies and wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, we are not to become corrupt and ready to be swept away with the besom of destruction. We might train every man on whom our message lays hold to live with the conviction that it is his duty, before he dies, to do something to make his own town more beautiful, his country happier, and the world better.
As I am addressing some who may before long be wielding a great influence, let me add one suggestion. In matters such as I have been speaking of to-day success comes to the man who has a programme. Now is the time, when you are looking out on the world with the keen eyes of youth, to note the abuses which need correction and to picture with the eye of the imagination the improvements which are required to wipe out the reproach or to elevate the reputation of your country. Fix the vision in the centre of your mind; keep it ever before you; and your dream may change to a reality which will modify the conditions of life for whole generations of your fellow-men. What could be worthier of your manhood at its present stage than to be revolving some plan for the benefit and honour of your country? Even if it should never come to anything, it will be good that it has been in your heart. But there is nothing else which is more likely to come to something. "What," says Alfred de Vigny, "is a great life? It is a thought conceived in the fervent mind of youth and executed with the solid force of manhood."