It is now twenty-nine years since I began my college life, a life which stretched out through eight years of good, hard work—four at the classics and four at medicine. During the college period and after it, and again, especially in these latter years as a teacher, I have always been most profoundly interested, as a student of human nature and of medicine, in trying to find out what ailed the world about me.
Why is it, as I have grown older, that I have come to find out that there is so much misery and unhappiness in the world?
Why is it that each successive generation of young men begin to run the life race that is set before them, full of vigor, of fine enthusiasm, and with a determination to accomplish great things, and then, one by one, drop back into the same indifference, and the same routine as was done by those who preceded them, the fire and all the enthusiasm gone, content in the end to make a good living and to take good care of themselves?
I would say of my own life that I have both lost something, and I have found something. I have lost that which I at first esteemed great, for I discovered as I went on that it was, after all, but a bubble, a glittering semblance of a jewel, evanescent and temporal.
But, wondrous to relate, I have found in its place something infinitely more precious, eternal, a possession which increases in value day by day, lending a reality and a value to life in all its relations far beyond all possible anticipation of all my early years.
Let me look at my life a little more closely. What have I actually lost? I think the loss can be pretty well covered by one word which used to figure largely in our college debates and chapel speeches, a word which covered the one great qualification in a man, which marked him out for success, and that word is “ambition.”
I remember well, setting success in life before me as the one great desideratum, and anxiously analyzing its essential elements, which seemed to resolve themselves into ability, ambition, opportunity, health, and adding various adjuvant qualities, such as judgment, memory, and tact. I found, by God’s grace, as I went on, that this, after all, was but a selfish scheme of living which, even if I might attain my end, was possible only for a fortunate few. I saw, too, some who were just about to take their fill of the cup of ambition, snatched away by an untimely death, while others, with all the other qualifications, were restrained from grasping the prize by the hand of disease; others again (worst mockery of all), who gained all the world could offer in the way of fame or of wealth, remained, after all, most miserable and dissatisfied with life.
My first aim was, therefore, manifestly a false one. What was I then to do? Conclude that life was naught but a mockery? I thank God that when I found the emptiness of the aims of the world, I also found that He was not sparing of His best gifts as I had begun to imagine. When I discovered that life and self were failures, I then found in Him more than heart could desire. Having no longer any good thing of my own, and now content to be as one of the servants in His house, I found instead that He had a glorious robe of righteousness of His own providing, and He was willing to set the very beggars who trusted Him among the princes at the gate. The glorious grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, which God in His great mercy has offered, not to a forward intellectual few, but to all men everywhere, came as a blessed solace to one who found on all sides the vanity of setting the affections on the things of this world.
I would like to dwell on this noble theme, for I would that young men everywhere could only see that there is just one thing in the world worth making the object of our ambition, and that is to know, to love, and to serve God, and to know Him in the only way we can know anything about Him, through His Son, Jesus Christ.
Christ’s service is not a theory of life or a philosophy, but a life, a new principle, a new birth, a new creation. Behold, old things are passed away, and all things are made new. And this knowledge, which brings the peace this world knows nothing of, is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit, who calls out and leads God’s people in their earthly pilgrimage.
“And this is life eternal, that they might know Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast sent” (John 17:3).
“Labor not for the meat which perisheth, but for that meat which endureth unto everlasting life, which the Son of Man shall give unto you: for Him hath God the Father sealed” (John 6:27).