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1. There is, for example, the yoke of home. Woe to that home which lays no yoke upon its inmates! That is the very office of the family towards its young and inexperienced members. To turn the current of the young life into a right channel — to make good habitual by use, and (to that end) to insist upon conformity to a good rule — to require, as the condition of maintenance, as the condition of protection, as the condition of life, that this and not this shall be the conduct and the speech and the temper and (down to very minute particulars) the mode of living — this is the duty of a home, in order that it may bring after it God's assigned and certain blessing. Now all this implies compulsion; for it demands of the young life that which it cannot give, and cannot be, without constraint.

2. But the home must at last send out its sons and its daughters into a rougher school of experience, and the hallway house on this journey is, first, the school, with its discipline, longer or shorter as the case may be, either of elementary or classical learning, and then in some form or other that which comes for most young men afterwards, the more special training for a particular profession or trade. Here too there is a yoke, and a yoke bearing; or else a refusal of the yoke, with many sad consequences of sorrow and shame. A day is coming for you, even in this life, when you will give God thanks for every day's trial, for every day's privation, for every day's hardship, which you have honestly and bravely borne.

3. Many suffer seriously throughout their life by not having borne in their youth the yoke of a Church. It is not well to be entirely at large in these matters. Who is the person looked to for counsel, who is the person privileged to advise, who is the person bound to reprove — and do not all young people need these offices from some one? — if the young Christian is sometimes at church, sometimes at chapel — sometimes at this church or this chapel, sometimes at that — thus evading, by a perpetual shifting of the scene, all the responsibilities and all the accountabilities of each and of all?

4. There is One who uses this very figure concerning His own Divine office, "Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me." Certainly of this yoke it must be true that it is good for a man to bear it in his youth. No age is too young for it: He Himself declared that infant children were not too young to put it on: He Himself dealt tenderly and lovingly with the young man who came to Him to be taught the way of life: and there is no doubt that, unless it is put on in youth, it never will sit quite easily, and it never will be without some galling pressure in later years, just because there is always some spiritual wound in the shoulder, or some effeminate softness in the arm of him who has tried other yokes first, of him who has begun by serving self, sin, or the world, and only comes late and in pain to submit himself to the healing and guiding and saving hand of Christ.

(Dean Vaughan.)

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KJV: It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth.

WEB: It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth.