What Young Men Need by Robert E. Speer

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · May 20, 1913

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 40, No. 20.

What Young Men Need

By Robert E. Speer

By Robert E. Speer in “S. S. Times.”

ABSOLUTE fidelity to truth. The great need of all days is for men and women who are absolutely true, who do not fool either other people or themselves, who will not lie, who act truthfully in everything, both great and small. “Power must come,” said Edward Thring, the great schoolmaster of Uppingham, at the opening of the schoolroom in 1863, “and there are two ways for it to come. Most of all, and first, the winning a character for truth and true honor. Most of all, that no lie in word or deed, no shams, no underhand deceits shall harbor here,—nothing that will not bear the light. Let this be the school character, as I trust it is, and fear not, the school is great. . . . Who shall set a limit to the power that goes forth from here? . . . Why should the prophecy of the little that remains be thought a vain dream,— the prophecy that a few years yet onwards, and by God’s blessing, when men think of their youth, and talk one with another of truth and honor and steadfast work, the name of the school shall rise readily to their lips, and deeds of patient endurance and a character hardly won for quiet, unassuming trustworthiness shall fill with honest pride the hearts of those who then shall be able to say, ‘And I, too, was at Uppingham’? Nothing is too great for the power of the truth.”