| Making the Most of Life |
Chapter 25 |
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Take education. Many young people fail to realize what golden opportunities come to them in their school days. Too often they make little of the privileges they then enjoy. They sometimes waste in idleness the hours they ought to spend in diligent study and helpful reading. They might, if they would, fit themselves for high and honourable places in after years; but they let the days pass with their opportunities. By and by they hear the school door shut. Then, all through their years they move with halting step, with dwarfed life, with powers undeveloped, unable to accept the higher places that might have been theirs if they had been prepared for them, failing often in duties and responsibilities – all because in youth they wasted their school days and did not seize the opportunities that then came to them for preparation. Napoleon, when visiting his old school, said to the pupils, “Boys, remember that every hour wasted at school means a chance of misfortune in future life.” Thousands of failures along the years of manhood and womanhood attest the truth of this monition.
Friendship is another opportunity that offers great blessing. Before every young person stand two kinds of friends, ever reaching out a beckoning hand. The one class whisper of pleasures that lead to sin and debasement. They offer the young man the wine glass, the gambling table, the gratification of lust and passion. They offer the young woman flattery, gay dress, the dance, pleasures that will tarnish her womanly purity. We all know the end of such friendship.
But there is another class of friends who stand before young people, wooing them to noble things. They may be plain, perhaps homely, and almost stern in their earnestness of purpose and in the seriousness with which they talk of life. They call to toil, to diligence, to self denial, to heroic qualities of character, to purity, to usefulness, to “whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are honourable, whatsoever things are lovely.” It is impossible to overstate the value of the blessings that true, wise, and worthy friendship offers to the young. It seeks to incite and stimulate them to their best in character and achievement. It would lift them up to lofty attainment, to splendid victoriousness. The young people to who comes the offer of such friendship are most highly favoured.
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