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CHARACTER :

DISCOURSE TO YOUNG MEN,

DELIVERED in

PLYMOUTH CHURCH,
. ROCHESTER, -N. Y.,
BY
JONATHAN EDWA'RDS,
pastor; ON
t \
SABBATH EVENING, JUNE 8th, 185G.

PUBLISHED BY REQUEST

ROCHESTER :
E. DARROW & BROTHER, 65 MAIN STREET.
1856.

CHARACTER:

DISCOURSE TO YOUNG MEN.

DELIVERED IN

PLYMOUTH CHURCH,
ROCHESTER, N. Y.,

BY

JONATECAISr EDWARDS,
<it (:'''¦¦¦"'¦
PASTOR,

SABBATH EVENING, JUNE 8th, 1856.

PUBLISHED BY REQUEST.

ROCHESTER :
E. DARROW & BROTHER 65 MAIN STREET.
1856.

DAILY ADVERTISER PRESS,
ROCHESTER, N. x.

A DISCOURSE TO YOUNG MEN.

PROVERBS XXII : 1.
"A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches."

By " a good name," we understand the inspired
writer to mean not so much a high estimate among
men as the substantial basis of that estimate, — not
so much reputation as character.
We can change the phrase of our text while we
retain its spirit in the proposition — Character, the
MOST VALUABLE OF' POSSESSIONS.
Look a moment at a young man as he goes forth
to try the world for himself. He is about to choose
among its proffered gifts, and the choice he now
makes will very probably be his choice for life. He
is full of vigor, full of animation, full of hope : all
the springs of life in him are high : the world seems
bright, clamors for his attention, presents a field for
the employment of every faculty, and offers him all
it has, — all its prizes, — occupation, riches, pleasure,
a home, reputation, knowledge, companions, station ;

and he must select for himself. What is the best
thing he can take ? He must place some one trea
sure above the rest, for there will come many an
emergency when his preferences cannot be concealed.
Let him choose before any thing else that which is
" rather to be chosen than great riches," which is
better than pleasure, and higher than station, that
which he can get in spite of every misfortune — nay,
which may be secured quite as well through misfor
tune as it could in uninterrupted prosperity — a true
and noble Character.
We dwell on three principal points — What is
character : what is the peculiar need of it : and how
to obtain it.
I. What is it ? What are some of the elements of
true Character ?
1. We must set aside, in the outset, the idea that
it is found in any of the trappings or mere circum*
stances of a person. It is not his but he himself. It
is not anything extraneous, as wealth, for be may
heir millions and be bankrupt in character ; or
station, for we have too plain demonstration of it to
make it necessary to prove that official place and
elevated character often are not even on speaking
terms with each other ; or the number and position
of one's friends, though they may for a time hold up

those who cannot stand of themselves. Character is
not any appendage nor on the outside, but is inter
nal, is the substance, is the intellectual and moral
life, is the man, and not his accidents.
2. Again, we are to. discriminate that character is
not one part of an individual disconnected from the
rest of him ; not a single act ; not a series of acts
viewed alone, — but it is the summing up and gen
eral effect of the whole.
3. And character, in the sense in which we are
now using it, includes the additional idea of good
character, of qualities which are esteemed and re
spected : and still, in addition, that these qualities are
strongly marked and carry with them an energy and
force commensurate with their other excellence.
The man of character then is he who has qualities
by which he can be distinguished ; they are good
qualities ; and he has them thoroughly and decidedly
developed. It is opposed therefore to that depravity
which permits one to be without any settled princi
ple ; and equally opposed to that infirmity of dispo
sition which permits him to be drawn hither or
thither by whatever influence ¦ chances to be nearest
or to act upon him last. It is that attempering of
qualities which compels respect and constitutes the
reliable basis of right endeavor. It is the whole
being guided into permanent, right, energetic activ-

ity. And this it is which niay properly be pronoun
ced more valuable than any other possession.
II. Now let us turn to some Reasons why the
Young Men of our land have peculiar need of such
Character. It would be required by any individual, but espe
cially by those who are in their youth-time, because
they are now in the process of laying the foundations
of their whole life and of their immortality. Still more
is it needed by young men because they are thrust
forth into the very turmoil of life ; they are urged
out far away from the quietness of the shore, or even
the unruffled waters of the harbor — out — where
the heaviest billows roll, and where they must have
some steady compass. And if needed by young
men any where, peculiarly by young men' in this
country, where every thing is in formation ; where
there is all the opportunity, and all the temptation
too of our new, and diversified, and mingled people ;
here where all extremes are meeting and we are in
the seething cauldron of such destinies as have never
been wrought out by any people beneath the sun.
To particularize in only two examples.
1. Our Young Men need Character, the most de
cided and correct, because of their frequent changes
of residence and the responsibilities devolving on
them in those changes. I refer to that restless activity

7
which is a national trait, and which keeps our young
men in almost perpetual motion. How few of the
young men of this congregation were born here,
and of those who were, how few are expecting to
abide here and be buried in this soil. Multitudes
of young men have come from elsewhere ; numbers
who originated here have already gone or are in
tending to go to some other part of the land. In
these ceaseless migrations all that is local, all that is
merely conventional, all that comes from the imita
tion simply of others' good habits — is removed.
The formalities of usage, the restraints of old com
panionships and of the presence or proximity of
elders and superiors are broken up. Yet such influ
ences as these are the small anchors which hold
many to their moorings, — and these are all. They
do not recognize the fact that they have nothing
more substantial until they are jostled out of their
wonted position, and are left to float free according
to their own affinities, and then find how easily, and
how fast, and how far they drift away from the
familiar and stable landmarks of good morals. They
need some great anchor of character which, cabled
with sound principle to unchanging Truth, will hold
through any storm.
A young man comes from his moral home into the
hurry and snares of a city business. His tempters

8
are new, his opportunities new, his stimulus new ;
it will not be strange if his vices become new — -if
his appearance and his habits change. With a fool
ish pride he discards his early carefulness ; he calls
it timidity ; he calls it ignorance of the world ; he
calls it lack of spirit ! With a sad folly he allows
himself to become the slave of his appetites ; he
wears off the modest hues of his home and of his
education; he grows hard in his look; he knows
the best saloons; he swaggers and riots and loses
his place! They call him a "fast" young man —
and he, is "fast" learning to ruin himself. Perhaps
he goes to seek his fortune in some opening settle
ment of the illimitable west. All things are new.
Stable customs ; social institutions ; religious culture
have not kept pace with the frenzy of enterprise.
Now he shows himself as he is. Hitherto he has
thought himself discreet and respectable. He has
every facility of opportunity and little external re
straint. What he wants is not knowledge, not merely
decent habits, not merely anxious friends, but he
wants Personal Character. He wants sound prin
ciple. He wants something to go with him and to
make him a law unto himself in the midst of an
eager, heterogeneous, reckless population, and thro'
all the > excitements of his distant, and lonely, and
dangerous career. He wants not merely a Bible in
his trunk, and the memory of his early instructions,

and a store of good advice — but he wants personal
character as solid as the foundations of his being,
and possessing a power of locomotion and of adhe
siveness which shall enable it to keep up with him,
however swiftly he moves, and to abide by him
wherever he goes — so that he who seemed a good
man here, shall be a good man when he gives his
name to a new township on the prairie, or when he
looks for gold along the shores of the Pacific.
Our young men need true character emphatically,
because of those extraordinary responsibilities which
rest upon them in laying as they do the foundations
of villages, cities, states, empires. They travel far
away to better their own temporal fortune, or per
haps only to expend the energy which they feel
bounding through them. But in the efforts they
make to advance their own fortune, is bound up the
character of a great territory just opening, it may
be, to a boundless population, and the well-being,
therefore, of uncounted thousands. What institu
tions shall be established ; what customs and influ
ences shall become traditionary there and be received
with all the veneration of a precedent from the
founders of the state — these are the questions which
they are unconsciously answering, even in the com
mon habits of their private life. To be convinced
of this we have but to reflect on the permanent and

1°
incalculable effect which they produce who are the
earliest founders of the little hamlet that is to grow
into the Chicago, or New York, or the San Francisco
of a great territory ; or to gather an illustration of
similar facts in the history, only half a century old, of
this city in which we are assembled. ,
And all this is responsibility to which any of our
young men may be called. The little settlement
which they commence this year, or of which they
become a part, may be — we cannot tell what — half
a century hence ! The dead bodies of men are occa
sionally found turned into stone in certain soils where
they have been covered up — but our youth are
perpetuating not the features of their faces and the
shape of their forms, but are sending down themselves
to the generations to come in the indestructible rock
of their own character impressed on the now pliant
institutions amidst which they live.
2. But, again, our young men need Character in
view of the present and coming crises of the country.
We are evidently living at a time when all who have
any share in public affairs must be ready to stand by
principles. It is a time when no deceitful prognos
tics warn of the approach of such decisions in our
national history as will call for whatever firmness and
manliness and courage, even youth, which is said to
admire those qualities most, can conceive.

11
It was a great result to begin a free Christian em
pire on these shores. It may yet prove a greater
task to cement and preserve and transmit the work
which has been wrought. If this splendid edifice of
a free Christian state be daubed with too much
untempered mortar, it must crumble to pieces. If
our population is determined to forget God, and not
to regard the operation of his hands, He will forsake
us. Even the most enlightened, the most free, the
most Christian republic on the globe, cannot endure
every thing. If it shall come to be understood that
savage ferocity is to take the place of intelligent
argument, ; if it is ever to be permitted that they
who cannot answer reasoning may crush their oppo
nents with brute muscle ; if the highest places of civil
dignity are to be polluted with the physical violence
of the coward and the bully ; if the greatest ques
tions of civilization are to be settled by pillage and
slaughter, and the perpetrators of such crimes, not
only against those who now live, but of such crimes
against millions yet unborn, of such crimes against
the very name of civil liberty, the perpetrators of
such crimes against humanity itself, are to escape
with impunity, then indeed is the time of our destruc
tion ¦ — of our deserved destruction as a people — nigh
at hand ! Then indeed are we too unworthy of what
has been given to us, and it had better be taken
away and we be wiped out from the map of the nations.

12
On the young men of a land which has such a
question to decide, responsibilities rest too great to be
described. And they are not responsibilities which
political intelligence, or political sagacity, or the
deepest interest in the administration of affairs can
determine. They are questions which have their
basis in principles and to which nothing, nothing, is
adequate except that reliable, substantial, Character
which shall study- the right, and having learned the
right, shall dare to maintain it, or die !
Character, personal Character, is the demand which
our country makes of her young men ; and not the
country only, but all the interests of freedom and of
man that have been committed to our hands, call
aloud for the same support.
The young men are to be the legislators of the
country. There they will need nothing so much as
Character. They are to choose those who will legis
late, and therefore they will have such laws as they
shall themselves select. They are to give name and
repute to the land that gave them birth ; that name
will be what they make it. And they are to be of
the number who shall avert from their guilty country
the just judgments of offended Heaven — if indeed
those judgments are to be turned away. Alike then
in respect to personal and to national affairs, it is the
great want that our young men should possess indi-

13
vidual character — - something within themselves that
can neither be awed by despotism nor besotted by
temptation ; something which, while it shall not be
too self-important, shall not cower before danger;
character, competent to form its own opinions, and
ready to act according to its sincere judgments ; not
afraid to differ even from those whom it respects ;
governed by something far higher than its own im
pulses ; acknowledging its responsibilities, imploring
divine light, confessing its weakness ; but which shall
firmly, calmly, continuously, walk in the paths of the
Right. Such a character is " rather to be chosen
than great riches."
III. It remains to ask How shall such a Character
be secured? The answer to this question is impor
tant in proportion to the value and necessity of the
attainment to be made ; and the sole answer which
the truth allows is that The only trust-worthy basis of
Character is true religion. That which is constructed
on other foundation may endure for a time ; it may
sustain itself through some trying scenes ; it may
successfully meet some temptations — but we can
really depend upon nothing less than the regenera
ting power and grace of God. It must be true reli
gion, not any thing spurious, not any affectation or
counterfeit of religion. It must be that which is a
principle in secret as well as openly ; that which does
not shift in the breath of popular opinion, but has its

14
life within itself drawn from unseen and immortal
fountains, as saith the Saviour, "The water that I
shall give him shall be in Rim a well of water spring
ing up into everlasting life."
1. For it is Religion that reaches the internal life.
That goes to the deep places of the soul. It affects
directly and profoundly the springs of moral vitality.
It is an interior force urging its way outward — a
volcanic fire which has' been kindling and glowing
within before it gives exterior manifestations of its
presence. 2. Then again it is Religion only which acts upon
the whole man and moulds all the powers. Other
energies may be signally efficacious on certain por
tions, but this asserts its supremacy every where. It
subordinates the intellect, the affections, the will,
the heart, and the life.
3. And once more, it is Religion which changes
the governing principle from an inferior and selfish
end to one high aim. It enters into the plans and
counsels of the mind and into the desires of the heart,
and remodels them all ; and these are the very mate
rials out of which character is formed ; so that from
the nature of religion and of character, the one ap
pears as the only sound basis of the other.
The same truth is illustrated not only from the

15
nature of religion but also from the history of those
who have exhibited the noblest character. The truly
grand and heroic in character has sprung out of the
truest devotion to God. Those who in the Scriptures .
stand out as the models of character, are also the
models of piety. The founders of the highest Chris
tian civilization on this continent, were men of char
acter the most decided, in many respects the most
noble. They prayed to God with a faith that rebukes,
they abandoned all worldly prospects with a fortitude
that astonishes, they attempted apparent impossibili
ties with a courage that awes us ; and they became
founders of exalted states and fathers of civil and
religious freedom because they first received in their
souls the baptism of the Holy Ghost.
The young men of to-day must have character built
upon personal religion if they obtain any which is to
be worth the name. We are already in a crisis of
our history as a nation, where no cheap advice to
violent speech or violent action will avail. It may
yet be necessary for us to sacrifice more than we
imagine. The glorious boon of such freedom as we
have been enjoying, may yet have to be re-purchased
by such perils and such deeds as our generation has
not known. We cannot be prepared for that which
awaits us except by putting on the whole armor of
God. We cannot know whither He would lead ex-

16
cept by habitual and fervent prayer to Him to teach.
We cannot disperse the evils that oppress our coun
try by waving over them any slender wand of worldly
sagacity, or muttering among them any charms of
mere political necromancy. ' ' This kind goeth not out
but by prayer and fasting."
In his business, in his political - acts, in his social
influences, in his family relations, in his moral choi
ces, in his religious belief and action, in all his order
ing of the present short life, in all his inevitable pre
paration for the life to come; every young man
among us, resident or stranger, whether still within
the fold of his own home or already thrown forth
alone to try the chances of existence, needs nothing
so much as that personal character, the foundation of
all right conduct, which comes from the renewing
grace of God and which is true religion received
into the heart and presiding over all the life.
Let no one sit down content with a knowledge of
the want or a confession of the only source of sup
ply. Let him rather take the gift of God which is
eternal life. Let him receive into himself the Lord
Jesus Christ as his Prophet, Priest and King ; as his
Governor, Guide and Friend : so shall he find a good
name that is indeed rather to be chosen than great
riches; when Christ shall say "I will not blot out
his name out of the book of life, but I will confess his
name before my father, and before his angels. Amen.

YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

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