20 BOYS OF THE BIBLE.

artists have painted for us, men of science and enterprise and
invention have made life a luxury, scholars have gone down
into the mines of knowledge that we might be enriched. All
the past has brought its tributes to our feet.

“We are heirs of all the ages
In the foremost files of time.”

It is a grand world to live in, let the grumblers com-
-plain as they will. It is God’s world! And the best place
in all God’s world to live in is America.

But the America of the next century ought to be a
still grander place to live in, and it rests with you to
make it so. Everything in America depends upon its men
and women. We have material wealth enough and to spare;
gold and silver and coal in our mines, timber in our forests,
corn on our prairies. Our chief wealth is in men—

“ They are the chief crop of our lands.”

The men who made America what it is to-day, were
men “with Empires in their brains,” with the fear of God
in their hearts, and with ceaseless industry in their hands.
They were the men so fitly described by the poet who, in
an outburst of patriotic pride, said:

“ The noblest men I know on earth,
Are men whose hands are brown with toil ;
Who, backed by no ancestral graves,
Hew down the wood and till the soil,

And thereby win a prouder fame
Than follows a King’s or a Warrior’s name.”

You will never have the up-hill work to do these pio-
neers did so bravely. But the twentieth century will expect
to see you worthy of your immortal sires, worthy of
your “heirship vast.” They dug through countless difficul-