useless, and you must not be cruel. If there is any one point
which, in six thousand years of thinking about right and wrong, wise
and good men have agreed upon, or successively by experience
discovered, it is that God dislikes idle and cruel people more than
any others:- that His first order is, "Work while you have light;"
and His second, "Be merciful while you have mercy."

"Work while you have light," especially while you have the light of
morning. There are few things more wonderful to me than that old
people never tell young ones how precious their youth is. They
sometimes sentimentally regret their own earlier days; sometimes
prudently forget them; often foolishly rebuke the young, often more
foolishly indulge, often most foolishly thwart and restrain; but
scarcely ever warn or watch them. Remember, then, that I, at least,
have warned YOU, that the happiness of your life, and its power, and
its part and rank in earth or in heaven, depend on the way you pass
your days now. They are not to be sad days: far from that, the
first duty of young people is to be delighted and delightful; but
they are to be in the deepest sense solemn days. There is no
solemnity so deep, to a rightly-thinking creature, as that of dawn.
But not only in that beautiful sense, but in all their character and
method, they are to be solemn days. Take your Latin dictionary, and
look out "solennis," and fix the sense of the word well in your
mind, and remember that every day of your early life is ordaining
irrevocably, for good or evil, the custom and practice of your soul;
ordaining either sacred customs of dear and lovely recurrence, or
trenching deeper and deeper the furrows for seed of sorrow. Now,
therefore, see that no day passes in which you do not make yourself
a somewhat better creature: and in order to do that, find out,
first, what you are now. Do not think vaguely about it; take pen