Life's Enthusiasms

It is the layman's privilege to take the text for his sermons
wherever he finds it. I take mine from a French novel, a cynical story
of an unpleasant person, Samuel Brohl, by Victor Cherbuliez; And this is
the text and the whole sermon:

"My son, we should lay up a stock of absurd enthusiasms in our youth or
else we shall reach the end of our journey with an empty heart, for we
lose a great many of them by the way."

And my message in its fashion shall be an appeal to enthusiasm in things
of life, a call to do things because we love them, to love things
because we do them, to keep the eyes open, the heart warm and the pulses
swift, as we move across the field of life. "To take the old world by
the hand and frolic with it;" this is Stevenson's recipe for joyousness.
Old as the world is, let it be always new to us as we are new to it. Let
it be every morning made afresh by Him who "instantly and constantly
reneweth the work of creation." Let "the bit of green sod under your
feet be the sweetest to you in this world, in any world." Half the joy
of life is in little things taken on the run. Let us run if we must
--even the sands do that--but let us keep our hearts young and our eyes
open that nothing worth our while shall escape us. And everything is
worth our while, if we only grasp it and its significance. As we grow
older it becomes harder to do this. A grown man sees nothing he was not
ready to see in his youth. So long as enthusiasm lasts, so long is youth
still with us.

To make all this more direct we may look to the various sources from