Blessed be God, there is a short way to the life I recommend. There are two steps by which you may enter it. Obtain, first, forgiveness for the sins of the past. God offers you all the merits of Christ’s atoning sacrifice. Through that great sacrifice he will receive you, and _remember_ your sins no more. In the blessed book, in every variety of form, in every glowing and rich expression, are you assured that pardon shall be granted to a repentant soul. Young man, this is the first step. Believe, and drop your burden of the sins of the past. Start a free man.
This is the second step: offer your life gratefully, lovingly, to the Friend and Saviour of your soul. Ask for his Spirit to help you: his ear will be swift to hearken. This love to him will make his yoke easy, will make the cross light, will make life to have a magnificent meaning, will make sorrow to wear a friendly guise, will break the force of temptation, will make sin the hateful thing. This will cause your feet to find “peace and pleasantness” on the path of life, till you reach the mansions where the golden gates shall be thrown open for you, and the angels shall tell you they have been waiting to welcome you.
SKEPTICAL DOUBTS: HOW YOU MAY SOLVE THEM.
My object in this address is, to relieve the doubts on religious subjects which meet a young man on setting out in life. Such doubts have been very common. Nor is it to be wondered at. With some, to doubt is constitutional. They are not able to give easy credence to any tidings. With others, the very stupendousness of religious subjects causes the mind to pause in doubtfulness; the revelations of Christianity are so transcendent, that thought wavers before their very grandeur. There may be doubt, yet again, from those appalling miseries of human life which it is the mission of Christianity to heal; and no less from the strangely unchristian lives of Christian men. All such doubts are to be treated tenderly. There are thousands of such doubters among young men at this hour; and they are not to be denounced, but helped.
On the other hand, you will, I trust, agree with me, that there is a pretence of doubting which is the simple outgrowth of flippant indifference or conceit. We hear Tennyson quoted, that there “lives more faith in honest doubt, than that in half the creeds.” Let me, however, remind you, that Mr. Tennyson did not mean _resting_ in doubt; he meant an “honest doubt,” that was bent upon inquiry, and was open to conviction. He therefore speaks in this same passage of one: