Think of the waste. Life, enthusiasm, purpose, divine endowments, all dripping away.

Think of the peril. You can see it in another's case; you cannot see it in your own. The aëronaut can travel only as the wind carries him; but if he sees danger ahead he comes down to the safe and firm ground. Learn a lesson from him.

Think of the ruin. Do you not see that you are losing game after game in the contests of life; here respect, there influence, and a thousand other losses.*

Leaving home is one of the most critical events in life. Now the young man has to think and act for himself. Now he is surrounded by strangers instead of the familiar faces which he has known from childhood. Now for the first time he appreciates home, when home comforts are missed. The Scottish emigrant in Canada, who complained pathetically that there were no linnets in the woods, put only a part for the whole. When we leave a kind and happy home, we soon find that we have left behind us many things besides linnets.

CHAPTER XXIX.

OLD AGE.

WHEN a man has worked hard all the day it seems meet that he should have the evening to himself, as it were for a reward. Old age is the evening of life, and it is the reward of labour, of temperance, and of self-control. Of what kind it shall be, whether hale and vigorous, or sickly and joyless-yea, even whether it shall be at all, depends very much on how a man has spent his youth and middle age.

The course of the generality in life resembles the ascent of travellers on a tropical mountain, at first hot and ardent, then moderately warm, and at the last stage cold and chilling. This process of cooling down is well known; but God has placed in our power many means by which to counteract the extreme tendency and to alleviate its effects.

Old age, which is often repulsive, is not so necessarily ; and a good old man may be like a mouldering ruin, beautiful in its decay. Indeed, age has a peculiar comeliness of its own; yea, sometimes a surpassing attractive

gelideque ministrat."-Ars. Poet., 171.

66

ness. A constant vivacity and cheerfulness, accompanied by a genial pleasantry, made Agesilaus more agreeable even in age than the young and handsome.* It may be a comfort to very plain people " that old age, that ill layerup of beauty, can do no more spoil" upon the face.† Yea, more, it has been remarked of some old men (such as Bishop Lonsdale) that they improve in beauty as their years increase, and the more evidently if they had little of the beauty of youth. It is not for nothing that the foliage is most beautiful in the fall. It would seem to suggest that old age may be most beautiful; and certainly it is so, when it is adorned with the graces and the charities and the pleasantries of a mind mellowed by experience and warmed with gratitude.

What can be more melancholy than an old man, contemplating the gradual ending of a useless life, and saying in reproachful soliloquy: I am dying; and as I ebb like a receding tide, I see only a line of sea-weed on the beach. The same idea, from another point of view, has been expressed with homely force by the Earl of Derby: "To pass out of the world in the world's debtto have consumed much and produced nothing; to have sat down, as it were, at the feast and gone away without paying his reckoning-is not, to put it in the mildest way, a satisfactory transaction.”

We often meet with people possessed with harmless delusions. Such notions may be permitted by Providence as alleviations of miserable circumstances; and this suppo

*Plutarch in Agesil.

"Henry V.," v. 2.

Then Lord Stanley.-Times, April 3, 1869.

sition is very probable in the case of the insane. It is one of the alleviations of life that old age creeps upon us imperceptibly. We are constantly enlarging the limit of youth, and the age which a young man thinks old an old man thinks young. This makes it difficult to realise age; although, with all the memoranda of civilisation, we cannot ignore it as barbarians do. Dr. Livingstone tells us of an African tribe very apathetic on this point. one of the natives knows how old he is. If asked his age, he answers by putting another question, "Does a man remember when he was born?"

Not

Some through severe shocks and trials grow grey and old all at once. There is the historic case of Henry of Navarre. When he heard that the king had promulgated the edict of Nemour (1585), he remained for a time with his face in his right hand. When he raised his face again-so he afterwards asserted-one side of his mustachio had turned white.* There can be no doubt that it is more natural and more desirable to grow old smoothly. Horace says that piety does not retard the approach of wrinkles; but that piety which obeys the divine laws of the body as well as the soul will prevent premature old age, and keep off wrinkles for many a year.

It is a pitiable sight to see an old man who has missed the object of life, who has lived many years and never arrived at true happiness, who has spent his life and energies and declares that all is vanity. Such a

* Motley's "United Netherlands,” i. 132.

+ жарws уnраokéμɛv is Homer's expression.-Od., iv. 210. Carm., ii. 14, 2.

I I

spectacle is by no means uncommon, and God has made a provision for the case in the scheme of Christianity. He is able and willing to renovate man's spiritual nature, and he can put a fresh kernel into an old and worn-out husk. Of course it is sad to think that a man should not understand life till he is about to leave it; that he should live all his years to himself and not to God; but we must console ourselves with the fact, that some plants are late and do not blossom till winter. even then.

Thank God, if

Christianity is especially encouraging, announcing the possibility of restoring the fallen, the degraded, the ungodly, at all periods of life, regarding this change always as practicable, and never implying that it is visionary, or unreal, or worthless,* or tantalizing as coming in at the end of life, but inestimable as coming in at the beginning of everlasting life.

The change of mind so familiar to Christianity, is always stupendous; but especially so in an old man. It involves a change of judgment, likings, desires, hopes, and prayers. When that is accomplished by the Spirit of God, then we have in human nature that wonderful phenomenon, which has been observed at least once in the natural world, a current running in an opposite direction to that in which the ancient river must have flowed.§

* γέροντα δ ̓ ὀρθοῦν, φλαυρον, ὃς νέος πέσῃ.—Εd. Col., 395. † μετάνοια.

† οἶσθ ̓ ὡς μετεύξει καὶ σοφωτέρα φανεῖ.—Med., 600.

§ "The Lekome now winds in its channel, in an opposite direction to that in which the ancient river must have flowed."-Livingstone's "Travels," p. 527.