The Morris County chronicle. [volume] (Morristown, N.J.) 1877-1915, 1899-06-09
MANY FAIR GRADUATES
Continued from First Page.
in full. The part addressed more par
ticularly TO the class follows:

But if we are to make straight paths
for our feet, we must be careful to con-
slider specially these things that involve
the structure of our whole life. You
young ladies are going out from the pro-
lection of the school where you have
been sheltered and nourished through
these years. You will have to face new
conditions in the way of life You will
have all the temptations that life brings,
and they are not few. There will be the
temptation to put yourself in accord
with the circumstances in which you
fiud yourself, irrespective of their rela-
tion to your own individuality-tom merge
your life in the great sum of convention
al conditions you find round about you.
Now give you pause. this afternoon,
and say to you in regard to these great
practical concerns of your life: Make
straight paths for your feet There
may be Christian men and women who
can go to the theatre and to progressive
euchre parties and do all these things
that to us who are growing older seem
so frivolous and contemplate there
may be those who can do these ard keep
their piety 1t is not for me to say what
any man or woman can do in the great
wide field where every of us is left to
reach decisions for ourselves But there
are some things that we need to remem-
Der. No matter what change has passed
over public thinking and public acting
in regard to great many things that
were to us fixed beyond repeal, there are
certain things that abide unchanged,
eternal, fundamental.
Sin the first place, remember that
whatever changes there may have been
in the habits and thinking of Christian
people, that no change has altered the
eternal quality or character of sin. 1t is
the same, gid it as you will, make it as
attractive as you may, when you come
to the last analysis you find the same Bit
ter curse in the heart of it that it had in
Eden. In all relations, social and prac
tical, you have the same given fact to
face. that sin is sin, and that it is evil.
In the midst of social custom it is your
duty to hold steadily before your mind
that there can be nothing made out of
evil courses but the bitterness of death.
" Secondly, there is the same tempter
that has always been seeking to draw
men and women away from things that
are highest and best. We may revise
our statements of doctrinal truth, we
may formulate a new creed, we may
create new science. we may illume the
world with new glories of discovery and
creation of human power, but remem-
Der that we have not revised Satan. We
have not altered single feature of
him who seeks to drag us from our high
ideals and fill our lives with bitterness
and sorrow. We have to reckon with
the same great power who from the be-
ginning has tempted men, no matter
what may be the religious condition into
which we are born. 1t is this that gives
grimness and seriousness to the lives of
earnest people. l do not wonder that
the face of Puritanism was hard. That
was life that hal conscience to its fin
ger nails, that throbbed through and
through with moral convictions and
whose life was lived in the very presence
of the eternal. When the consciousness
of the relations of life to God and the
eternal comes to us, we steady ourselves
in front of things that we have been
thinking about with carelessness, and
we ask, Can l, dare 1, do this? And you
settle the question not before the tri-
bunal Of conventionality or custom, but
before God. You find in these supreme
moments Of life the Eternal standing
over against the whole stream of your
living and the quality of your character,
to stamp it for glory or shame.
"And then whatever change may
have come over things in the great prac-
teal work of Christian living, there has
been no change in regard to the great
ideals of Christian life and character.
Remember that you are here not to
make creed but to erect life. You
are not here to be mere creatures that
have had training in religious habits,
but here to have in the centre of life the
consciousness of divine authority that is
over you, erecting for you ideals, not
leaving you to create them. 1t seems to
me that is the temptation of to-day, to
think we can make right and wrong if
we have what is called conscience. But
let us remember that there is nothing
that can be SO trifed with as that thing
we call conscience. Conscience has no
moral force unless it gets our life right
up against Gods and makes us feel that
that there is something else TO be reck-
oned with in our living than our own
petty conceit.
And duty is unchanged, amid all the
varied forms of the new life we are liv-
ing In all the varying forms of our life
there is underneath the eternal fact of
obligation which cannot be discounted,
and we have to recognize our obligations
to God no matter what changes come
over the world of our active life.
My friends, our lives are too grand
to be left in our keeping and to our di-
rection. These possibilities are too
majestic to be committed to our care.
For little while and along little lines
we might manage it, but God means
greater things for as than we can con-
ceive for ourselves. We cannot plan
for it adequately. We want definite
ideals, and God has given them in His
word and in the life of Jesus Christ. In
these two realms of things we find that
what survives and defies the criticism of
life are those that root themselves in.
Gods life and come out of Gods heart
into our lives and into our hearts.
And so you must reckon in the midst
of all this unsettledness that is in the
midst of us. You must reckon with def
mite ideals that submit themselves to
no human criticism, that stand like
Gibralters defying the wastes of change
and the decays of custom, strong as the
everlasting hills.
And SO, dear friends, we need hold
ing these truths firmly in our grasp. and
you especially, young ladies of the grad
uating class, who are going forth to the
responsibilities of life, to fill places as