Your After Self—What Shall It Be?
By I. C. Colcord
THE present self has much to do with the after self. As the tint of the morning shows the coming day, so budding childhood shows the coming man. Then each boy and girl has a large duty in life toward the after self—the man or the woman he or she ought to be. Adown the vista the after self is waiting his turn. His soul, mind, body, and strength are now in the vital grasp of boyish hands. He is helpless, for he can only take for his inheritance what is given to him by your present self. Will it be a brain deranged by lust and dissipation, or a mind well trained to think like flashes of lightning, a nervous system ever controllable as the rudder by the pilot wheel? Or will you throw away his inheritance in a feverish frenzy of youthful8tangoing with sin, wantonness, and decay, before he has had the experienced joy of touching it? Will you turn over to him a brain distorted, a heart riddled by disease of intemperance, a “spinal cord grown through and through with devil grass of that vile harvest we call wild oats,” soaked and bloated with that “social glass” of a “good time” which breaks no records, because the record breaks him? Will you let your after self take his place as a man among men, hallowed by your protective present self, and fortified against the tempest of temptation? Or will you shatter his hopes, and fling to the wild winds, decreeing, abandon-like, that the man or the woman you might have been, shall never be? “One ship drives east, and one drives west,
By the very same wind that blows.
’Tis the set of the sails, and not the gales,
That tells which way she goes.” The habit-forming period carries with it tremendous responsibilites, for habit-forming is far easier than habit-breaking. So every youth should soliloquize, and as Solomon says, “ponder the path of thy feet, and let all thy ways be established.” “For the ways of man are before the eyes of the Lord, and He pondereth all his goings.”
I. C. COLCORD.