---
title: 'George Howe’s Appeal to Young Men'
type: post
author: 'R. Andrew Myers'
date: 2024-02-06
url: https://confessional.org/blog/2024-george-howes-appeal-to-young-men
---

# George Howe’s Appeal to Young Men

“Young men, we speak to you. From you is to come, if it comes at all, the future ministry of the church. If our number is ever increased, the ranks are to be filled by you. You, therefore, under God, are our hope. And, if the church to which we belong and which we love, is to be overshadowed with sad eclipse, and the principles for which our fathers contended are to go down in this community; if Presbyterianism which was conjoined at the reformation with civil liberty, and has ever been united with it, is to fade away, or to be less prominent than heretofore, on you will rest much of the reproach. It will be because you honor not the ministry, you have not devotion and self-denial sufficient to obey your Saviour and follow him through evil as well as through good report. It is because the world has taken hold of you with a grasp so giant-like, that you will not follow the path of your duty. Yes, young men of the Christian church, we ask you solemnly and earnestly why you are not serving the Master who redeemed you, in the sacred office of preaching the gospel? Pious youth in our schools and colleges, why have you not chosen with your earliest studies the ministry as your profession? why are you not straining every nerve to qualify yourselves for its duties?” — [**George Howe**](/authors/george-howe), *An Appeal to the Young Men of the Presbyterian Church of the Synod of South Carolina and Georgia* (1836), pp. 10-11