gates of his kingdom in the face of the virgins who preferred indolence and sleep to duty, and the man who wrapped up his gifts in a napkin he sent away to darkness. Oh, you were made for a better companionship than those of whom it is said:

"Their only labor is to kill time,

And labor dire it is, and weary woe;

They sit, they loll, turn o'er some idle rhyme,

Or saunter forth with tottering steps and slow."

Life is not a toy to be played with, a doll to be dressed, an ornament to exhibit, nor a bubble to float in the air, nor an insect to dance on the wave until some wind overtake it; it is not to be a low or dreamy indulgence, not a plague that wastes. Life is a great gift of God, a single opportunity with possibilities vast enough to fill time and eternity with the beatitudes of God, the joy of the angels, and praise of men. Goethe said, "To be useful, that is life." To be useful! How noble, how vast, how sublime, how Christ-like! Henceforth let your life be such as the poet sings:

"I live for those that love me,

For those that know me true,

For the heaven that smiles above me,
And waits my coming too;

For the cause that lacks assistance,
For the wrongs that need resistance,
For the future in the distance,

For the good that I can do."

VIII.

THANKSGIVING FOOTBALL.

THE present athletic craze is a reaction from the unwise indifference of the past. In the college halls, where Minerva once held sway, Hercules is now enshrined. The principal talk among college men is football, and our colleges and students take rank, not according to their intellectual attainments and manly character, but according to the size of the biceps muscle and the record in some sort of sport.

Sin committed in the pursuit of pleasure is as sinful as if done for the sake of profit. Thanksgiving Day among the people generally has more to do with the stomach than with the service of God, and with the students especially it has, within several years, become the day when lads get on their first spree.

The sights enacted in our city Thursday night by the college men, the taking possession of saloons, breaking up theaters, blowing

horns in people's faces, kissing unprotected women on the public streets, carrying them on their shoulders, drinking themselves drunk, shouting themselves hoarse, and singing with Bowery-tough bravado were a disgrace to our civilization, and the colleges and universities which tolerate such depravities should be consistent and drop the name of Christian.

A thousand wild Indians or monkeys turned loose could not have acted worse than did the respectable sons of praying mothers from colleges and universities founded by Christian patriots. I know this is unpopular talk, but with popularity an honest preacher has simply nothing to do.

That these excessive college sports unfit the students who take part in them for the active work of life is evident from the fact that the majority of our best scholars and most successful men come from the smaller colleges; and if the rich men believe in developing the brains of the country, let them endow the hundreds of small, struggling colleges throughout the land.

On a day set apart by the President of the United States of America for thanksgiving to God for his goodness of the year, cultured gentlemen fight like madmen, goaded by twenty-five thousand people, as if bereft of their

reason, sitting nearly five hours in the chilling blasts and yelling themselves hoarse. It shows a tendency in our national life that not only poisons the young, but may plague our fair republic into the grave of the dead nations of history.

IX.

THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE PRESS.

THE most influential factor in our American life is the newspaper. The mother dies, the school is only for our younger days, and the church reaches only a part of the community. The newspaper reaches everybody. It comes to us not only as a news-teller, but also as an oracle. It not only reflects public sentiment, but also shapes it. With few exceptions I can truthfully say the newspapers of this city are daily preaching sobriety, temperance, and honesty in every department of life. Here

and there a sensational sheet becomes a sewer and publishes the putrefying details of vice and shame, and magnifies a good man's honest intentions into a public scandal; but the daily press in this city, with few exceptions, has been brave to denounce wrong-doing in high and low places, swift to recognize merit in public life and defend the oppressed, and in its tone and tendency is far above the majority of the life that reads it.