That means that eternal vigilance is the price, not only of liberty, but of a great many other things.  It is the price of everything that is good.  It is the price of one’s own soul.  It is the price of the souls of the people you love; and when it comes down to the final reckoning you have a standard that is immutable.  What shall a man give in exchange for his own soul?  Will he sell that?  Will he consent to see another man sell his soul?  Will he consent to see the conditions of his community such that men’s souls are debauched and trodden underfoot in the mire?  What shall he give in exchange for his own soul, or any other man’s soul?  And since the world, the world of affairs, the world of society, is nothing less and nothing more than all of us put together, it is a great enterprise for the salvation of the soul in this world as well as in the next.  There is a text in Scripture that has always interested me profoundly.  It says godliness is profitable in this life as well as in the life that is to come; and if you do not start it in this life, it will not reach the life that is to come.  Your measurements, your directions, your whole momentum, have to be established before you reach the next world.  This world is intended as the place in which we shall show that we know how to grow in the stature of manliness and of righteousness.

I have come here to bid Godspeed to the great work of the Young Men’s Christian Association.  I love to think of the gathering force of such things as this in the generations to come.  If a man had to measure the accomplishments of society, the progress of reform, the speed of the world’s betterment, by the few little things that happened in his own life, by the trifling things that he can contribute to accomplish, he would indeed feel that the cost was much greater than the result.  But no man can look at the past of the history of this world without seeing a vision of the future of the history of this world; and when you think of the accumulated moral forces that have made one age better than another age in the progress of mankind, then you can open your eyes to the vision.  You can see that age by age, though with a blind struggle in the dust of the road, though often mistaking the path and losing its way in the mire, mankind is yet—­sometimes with bloody hands and battered knees—­nevertheless struggling step after step up the slow stages to the day when he shall live in the full light which shines upon the uplands, where all the light that illumines mankind shines direct from the face of God.

[E] In the Areopagitica:  “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.”

[F] Sir George Williams, 1821-1905, an English philanthropist, founder of the Young Men’s Christian Association.

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