Yet, this buoyancy and light-heartedness are legitimate feelings.  They spring up, like wild-flowers, from the very nature of man.  God intends that prismatic hues and auroral lights shall flood our morning sky.  He must be filled with a sour and rancid misanthropy, who cannot bless the Creator that there is one part of man’s sinful and cursed life which reminds of the time, and the state, when there was no sin and no curse.  There is, then, to be no extermination of this legitimate experience.  But there is to be its moderation and its regulation.

And this we get, by the introduction of the feeling and the principle of religious fear.  The youth ought to seek an impression from things unseen and eternal.  God, and His august attributes; Christ, and His awful Passion; heaven, with its sacred scenes and joys; hell, with its just woe and wail,—­all these should come in, to modify, and temper, the jubilance that without them becomes the riot of the soul.  For this, we apprehend, is the meaning of our Lord, when He says, “I will forewarn you whom ye shall fear:  Fear him, which after he hath killed hath power to cast into hell; yea, I say unto you, Fear him.”  It is not so much any particular species of fear that we are shut up to, by these words, as it is the general habit and feeling.  The fear of hell is indeed specified,—­and this proves that such a fear is rational and proper in its own place,—­but our Lord would not have us stop with this single and isolated form of the feeling.  He recommends a solemn temper.  He commands a being who stands continually upon the brink of eternity and immensity, to be aware of his position.  He would have the great shadow of eternity thrown in upon time.  He desires that every man should realize, in those very moments when the sun shines the brightest and the earth looks the fairest, that there is another world than this, for which man is not naturally prepared, and for which he must make a preparation.  And what He enjoins upon mankind at large, He specially enjoins upon youth.  They need to be sobered more than others.  The ordinary cares of this life, which do so much towards moderating our desires and aspirations, have not yet pressed upon the ardent and expectant soul, and therefore it needs, more than others, to fear and to “stand in awe.”

II.  Secondly, youth is elastic, and readily recovers from undue depression.  The skeptical Lucretius tells us that the divinities are the creatures of man’s fears, and would make us believe that all religion has its ground in fright.[3] And do we not hear this theory repeated by the modern unbeliever?  What means this appeal to a universal, and an unprincipled good-nature in the Supreme Being, and this rejection of everything in Christianity that awakens misgivings and forebodings within the sinful human soul?  Why this opposition to the doctrine of an absolute, and therefore endless punishment, unless it be that it awakens a deep and permanent dread in the heart of guilty man?