The subject thus brought before our minds, by the inspired Word, has a wide application to all ages and conditions of human life, and all varieties of human character.  We desire to direct attention to the use and value of religious fear, in the opening periods of human life.  There are some special reasons why youth and early manhood should come under the influence of this powerful feeling.  “I write unto you young men,”—­says St. John,—­“because ye are strong.”  We propose to urge upon the young, the duty of cultivating the fear of God’s displeasure, because they are able to endure the emotion; because youth is the springtide and prime of human life, and capable of carrying burdens, and standing up under influences and impressions, that might crush a feebler period, or a more exhausted stage of the human soul.

I. In the first place, the emotion of fear ought to enter into the consciousness of the young, because youth is naturally light-hearted.  “Childhood and youth,” saith the Preacher, “are vanity.”  The opening period in human life is the happiest part of it, if we have respect merely to the condition and circumstances in which the human being is placed.  He is free from all public cares, and responsibilities.  He is encircled within the strong arms of parents, and protectors.  Even if he tries, he cannot feel the pressure of those toils and anxieties which will come of themselves, when he has passed the line that separates youth from manhood.  When he hears his elders discourse of the weight, and the weariness, of this working-day world, it is with incredulity and surprise.  The world is bright before his eye, and he wonders that it should ever wear any other aspect.  He cannot understand how the freshness, and vividness, and pomp of human life, should shift into its soberer and sterner forms; and he will not, until the

  “Shades of the prison-house begin to close
     Upon the growing Boy."[2]

Now there is something, in this happy attitude of things, to fill the heart of youth with gayety and abandonment.  His pulses beat strong and high.  The currents of his soul flow like the mountain river.  His mood is buoyant and jubilant, and he flings himself with zest, and a sense of vitality, into the joy and exhilaration all around him.  But such a mood as this, unbalanced and untempered by a loftier one, is hazardous to the eternal interests of the soul.  Perpetuate this gay festal abandonment of the mind; let the human being, through the whole of his earthly course, be filled with the sole single consciousness that this is the beautiful world; and will he, can he, live as a stranger and a pilgrim in it?  Perpetuate that vigorous pulse, and that youthful blood which “runs tickling up and down the veins;” drive off, and preclude, all that care and responsibility which renders human life so earnest; and will the young immortal go through it, with that sacred fear and trembling with which he is commanded to work out his salvation?