"Men Talk Monday" The Power of Purpose! DO MEN KNOW THEIR PURPOSE?

When calculating the prospects of a young man, and the likelihood of his being able to go through life without being taken off his feet, I always want to know whether he stands for anything in particular. A written sentence may be mere words or it may mean something. So a young man may be only a mixture of body and soul or he may mean something: that combination of body and soul may stand as the expression of an idea. He may be some truth incarnate, so that when you meet him you feel that you are encountering that truth, and when he talks to you have somehow the notion that truth is addressing you and arguing itself out with you. We none of us have to look far to find such men. There may be a certain stringency and aggressiveness about them sometimes that makes them uncomfortable, a kind of directness about them that makes them inevitable, but there is no mistaking their meaning. They are an idea become flesh—a doctrine, a theory, dressed in human apparel. The feature in the case of interest to us just now is that a man so conditioned is not likely to lose his way nor to founder. The point is not that he has mastered the idea, but that the idea has mastered him and in that way counteracts the influences operating to pull him in other ways…

There are a great many meaningless men in the community, and what that means is that, while they have the intelligence to understand an idea and the heart to feel it, yet the idea never gets so close to them as to have its reality tremendously experienced by them. We do not win our strength and stability by mastering ideas, but by being mastered by them—held in their grip. A man never really knows what there is in him, how much he can do, or how much he can withstand, till he gets fairly in under just such governance.