Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1886 [PAGE 193]

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185 if you will, shut out the song and the sunshine, with all visions of blue sky and laughing water. You may so act as to bar out all the glorious prospects of worldly success, which now beckon to jovt with alluring gesture, by such wrong doing as others as capable and as promising as yourselves have chosen to perpetrate. Yon may turn your feet into paths that will lead far away from the New Jerusalem. What you will choose you'only can determine. Now what doth God demand of you? What things that are God's* should you render unto God? What do you possess that is not God's? This is God's demand, as formulated by his Son Jesus Christ t | Mark x n : 29, 30.] " H e a r , 0 Israel, the Lord thy God is one Lord! " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength. "And thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." To love the Lord with all one's heart, soul, mind and strengths is to give one's self wholly to the Lord, and to consecrate one'senergies in his service. But you will say, "what am I commanded to do? What avocation shall I undertake? Must I become a preacher of his gospel?" Yes. Possibly as its accredited messenger, preaching formally as God's.'minister; but certainly by t h e voices/ of your daily walk and conversation. Beyond that I can not tell you that this directs you to any definite calling. The directing finger of Providence alone can point out to you the pathway you must; travel. The chroniclers of early discovery relate that the hale old seacaptain, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, called out from the deck of his. foundering ship, "Be of good cheer, we are as near to heaven by sea as by land—and the frigate's lights went suddenly out." So I believe a man may in all his energies be consecrated to . the Lord^ and ought to be so consecrated, as well in one occupation as another, provided that both be alike lawful and just. We may believe that God's providence has determined that all forms of progress on this earth shall go forward. God has ordained that ships shall furrow the sea; that ways shall be multiplied by which men shall go to and fro on the land; that electric lights shall burn; that the earth shall yield her increase, as well from mine and wave as from forest and soil; that machinery shall sing its busy h u m ; that science shall be developed; that knowledge shall increase, and withal that the knowledge of his name and his gospel shall be carried to all the inhabitants of the world. We must believe that all these are but parts of his great design, and that it is his will that divers men shall pursue divers occupations in the progress of those designs. He best fulfils the command who anchors his purposes and his will hard by the will of God, and exerts all his energies todo that will in the place assigned to him. What is required of you? Hear again the word, as spoken by the mouth of his holy prophet. [Micah 6: 8 ] : "And what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?"