Can you remember your youth well enough to be able to recall the
time when the great things happened for which you seemed to be
waiting? The boy who is to be a soldier--one day he hears a distant
bugle: at once HE knows. A second glimpses a bellying sail:
straightway the ocean path beckons to him. A third discovers a
college, and toward its kindly lamps of learning turns young eyes
that have been kindled and will stay kindled to the end.

For some years this particular lad, this obscure item in Nature's
plan which always passes understanding, had been growing more
unhappy in his place in creation. By temperament he was of a type
the most joyous and self-reliant--those sure signs of health; and
discontent now was due to the fact that he had outgrown his place.
Parentage--a farm and its tasks--a country neighborhood and its
narrowness--what more are these sometimes than a starting-point
for a young life; as a flowerpot might serve to sprout an oak, and
as the oak would inevitably reach the hour when it would either die
or burst out, root and branch, into the whole heavens and the
earth; as the shell and yolk of an egg are the starting-point for
the wing and eye of the eagle. One thing only he had not outgrown,
in one thing only he was not unhappy: his religious nature. This
had always been in him as breath was in him, as blood was in him:
it was his life. Dissatisfied now with his position in the world,
it was this alone that kept him contented in himself. Often the
religious are the weary; and perhaps nowhere else does a perpetual
vision of Heaven so disclose itself to the weary as above lonely
toiling fields. The lad had long been lifting his inner eye to this
vision.

When, therefore, the tidings of the university with its Bible