It is blighted in the first experience of life, most commonly when a boy first goes to school.  Then his mere innocence, which indeed he may be said to have worn rather instinctively than by choice, becomes grievously polluted.  Then come the hardness, the coarseness, the intense selfishness; sometimes, too, the falsehood, the cruelty, the folly of the boy:  then comes that period, so trying to the faith of parents, when all their early care seems blasted; when the vineyard, which they had fenced so tenderly, seems all despoiled and trodden under foot.  It is indeed a discouraging season, the exact image of the ungenial springs of our natural year.  But after this there comes, as it were, a second beginning of life, when principle takes the place of innocence.  There is a time,—­many of you must have arrived at it,—­when thought and inquiry awaken; when, out of the mere chaos of boyhood, the elements of the future character of the man begin to appear.  Blessed are they for whom the confusion and disarray of their boyish life is quickened into a true life by the moving of the Spirit of God!  Blessed are they for whom the beginnings of thought and inquiry are the beginnings also of faith and love; when the new character receives, as it is forming, the Christian seed, and the man is also the Christian.  And, then, this second beginning of life, resting on faith and conscious principle, and not on mere passive innocence, stands sure for the middle and the end:  those who so watch and pray as to escape out of this critical period, not merely unharmed, but, as it were, set clearly on their way to heaven, will, with God’s grace, escape out of the things which shall befal them afterwards, till they shall stand before the Son of Man.

But the word is, “Watch and pray always, that ye may be accounted worthy to escape.”  We see the time with many of you come, or immediately coming; out of your present state a character will certainly be formed; as surely as the innocence of childhood has perished, so surely will the carelessness of boyhood perish too. A character will be formed, whether you watch and pray, or whether you do neither; but the great point is what this character may be.  If you do not watch the process, it will surely be the character of death eternal.  Thought and inquiry will satisfy themselves very readily with an answer as far as regards spiritual things:  their whole vigour will be devoted to the things of this world, to science or to business, or to public matters, all alike hardening rather than softening to the mind, if its thoughts do not go to something higher and deeper still.  And as years pass on, we may think on these our favourite or professional subjects more and more earnestly; our views on them may be clearer and sounder, but there comes again nothing like the first free burst of thought in youth; the intellect in later life, if its tone was not rightly taken earlier, becomes narrowed in proportion to its