Ah! worldly wise though it _seems_, it is the most injurious and harmful advice that the young could possibly receive. Where would progress and advancement be to-day if many had not totally disregarded such smug, self-contented, unheroic advice! Thank God, youth is the time for adventure, for striking out, for _making mistakes_, for learning, for testing, for "proving _all_ things," and holding fast to that which is good. Old age has had its day. It has made its mistakes and profited by them. Let it keep its hands off the young. Let them have their opportunity.
Herbert Spencer tells of throwing up a good job as civil engineer in order to experiment with a matter that a fortnight proved to be utterly impossible. Yet fifty years later he thus reviewed this apparently self-injurious act: "Had there not been this seemingly foolish act, I should have passed a humdrum and not very prosperous life as a civil engineer. That which has since been done would never have been done."
In other words, the act that shook him out of the rut, the contented, common, mediocre path, compelled him to find a new path for himself, and this called upon all the resources of his great and, to him and others, unknown nature, and he developed into the transcendent genius, the profound philosopher, whose writings had greater influence, perhaps, upon his century than those of any other man.
Hence I want to radiate the spirit of complete fearlessness, not only for myself, but for my young friends of both sexes, all the sons and daughters of men. I would calmly watch them plunge overboard into the ocean of life, trustful and confident, having first taught them the first few strokes of swimming--the principles of true and godly living--and then stand, fearlessly, and watch them strike out for themselves. I swam,--why should not they? God is in His heaven to-day watching the sparrows fly just as He was a score, a hundred, a thousand years ago.
In the mental world how fearful people often are of breaking away from old ideas. Only the other day a friend wrote me that he had been to a funeral, conducted by an orthodox clergyman. He said: "I imagine his is a very orthodox denomination, if he is a fair sample of what they believe. Glimmerings of a soul that hungers for larger things than its creed allowed was evident in his talk, however. Is it not pitiful, and more, is it not tragical, how people allow their soul-instincts and natural outreachings to be killed, or hampered, or stilled by what their befuddled brains or the brains of others have decided is proper, or accepted as proper, to believe?"