On Dragging Others Down…

In our concern for restlessness and lawlessness and looseness we need perhaps to search ourselves, remembering that any letting down in example or in attitude on the part of any parent or teacher, or anyone who influences young people, leads in turn to their letting down their standards of life. And any adult who lets down a little, may find that his children, or his young friends, let down further than the example they follow. It is awesome to contemplate the responsibility of influencing the lives, the minds, the morals, the faith and ideals of others, or in leading them to lower levels.

This laxity and looseness, if unchecked, will break the hearts, the homes, the happiness of people, young and old, and lead to a kind of jungle law. And the price is always paid, in broken lives, in disease and shame and sorrow.

One of the “first and foremost” facts to face, to city a thoughtful observer of the subject, “is…that Nature is the expression of a definite order with which nothing interferes successfully, and that the chief business of men is to learn that order, and govern themselves accordingly.”

“This light cannot come,” wrote Phillips Brooks, “except through purity and righteousness; lust and iniquity are surely darkness…Oh, that there could thrill through the being of our young men,” he added, “some electrical sense that they are God’s sons, that they might…live the life and attain the nature which are rightly theirs.”

Those who would undermine the moral foundations, and w World and Other Sermons: The Choice Young Man