But Hope dotes
on youth. The young are her flock, her fold, her children. Into the
hands of her children she puts the scimitar of courage, and bids them go
forth again. Let us suppose you have been cast down your ladder, and
have little but your courage. It may be necessary to leave your pleasant
little town and seek employment where men are used as machines--in the
great cities. Such a fate is, indeed, a sad reverse. The safety of
home, the magazines of moral ammunition stored all about you, the
bomb-proofs against the shells of soul-destruction aimed at every
soldier in life, will all be torn from you, and you will be as a Knight
of the Cross, alone on the desert. Perhaps
YOU HAVE REACHED THE GREAT CITY.
Now buckle on your armor. You do not need an intrepid courage, now;
intrepid courage may have brought you here; intrepid courage is but a
holiday kind of a virtue, to be seldom exercised, as experience will
teach you. You need firmness to resist all kinds of attacks. You need
good-nature, and yet you must repel temptation with a look as black as
Erebus. You need affability, yet you must speak almost by rote, and the
opportunities to keep from speaking outnumber the exigencies in which
you must speak by ten to one.
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