Читать книгу Young Men; In Business онлайн

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You young men who sneer at religion as weakness and call godliness hypocrisy, it is you who are the hypocrites. You have risen many a morning after a night of sin, and have felt how satiety and loathing were making deep footprints in your nature. You have seen the shamelessness and hollowness of wickedness, and have been too cowardly to say that you saw it. You have laughed at virtue while you were bearing agonies in your flesh which were horrible and indescribable. In ten years the tempter I have spoken of was in his grave; and if the brief life and dreadful end of thousands of young men in England could be portrayed, it would be the most awful tragedy ever told. Men would be horrified as they read it, and the ghastly memory would haunt them for years. Ah, men do not know it. These young men go from the great cities to die in country homes, or they lie solitary in the upper chambers of lodging-houses in back streets. Angel sisters are kept from sights which they could not comprehend. Nurses shrink from the foul and loathsome atmosphere. And this is what they have made of life—a murdered manhood; not living out half their days: a past all loss, a future all blackness. Oh, where are our tears if they do not fall over numbers who are dying every day in such chambers and with such demons of remembrance?