Part 2
In other words, a man cannot wallow through the mire to the skies. No man can have two standards, one to be followed until he be forty or fifty, and then suddenly put away. No man can divest himself of the lower ideal which he has adopted as a temporary expedient, because in the meantime it has come to have the mastery over his soul. Putting aside the great choice, the hour comes when a man finds himself incapable of the great refusal and the standard to which he gave his temporary adherence, to be abandoned in the years of opulence and safety, becomes his despotic and inescapable master. It is no more possible to have two standards in the world of the spirit than it is possible to prescribe two different moral standards for men and women. Unity must be sought and achieved at the outset, not a lowered standard in the beginning and a higher standard in the end. The habit of the soul cannot be altered at will. Once to every man and not a thousand times comes the moment to decide, and the earlier decision will in part, if not in whole, be determinative of every later choice.
And if, young men and women, there were nothing else for which to prepare, there is the future, there is the holy calling of parenthood to be pursued by most of you. Have I not the right to appeal to young men and women to-day to remember how much or how little they can make of their own lives, and may we not base such appeal upon the truth that they are to be the makers and the molders of the morrow; that unless their lips and lives proclaim the voice of God in the soul of man, there will follow a little-souled and mean-hearted generation instead of a race of great-hearted and noble-souled men and women.
A beautiful passage in an allegory recently presented upon the stage tells of the song of unborn souls, which are dreaming of the parenthood to be their lot upon earth and looking forward with heavenly joy to the supreme felicity and benediction of parenthood. The most important duty of youth is to prepare with consciousness and consecration for life’s highest duty,—the duty of parenthood. Shall that future be polluted, shall that heritage be befouled? In reminding young men and women as I do that they are the trustees of the morrow, that they hold in their keeping the destiny of all the future, I am tempted to ask a question. What if I were to bring a little child before you, some beautiful child of a year or two, and what if some man sitting in this company were to come hither and for some unknown reason strike that child: would it not be with difficulty that we could restrain ourselves from doing violence to such a creature? What of the men and women committing a crime infinitely more hurtful, who would not strike a little child, but who, none the less, are ready to doom unborn generations to a heritage of evil, of hurt, of shame? What young man or woman will not think upon that?
A further word should be spoken to young women who in every generation are standard-bearers, and not only standard-bearers but standard-lifters. I know it to be true that ofttimes women conform to the lower standards which men impose upon them. Yet is it true that women may be the makers of standards if they will, and that, if they consent to the lowering of the standards, men will readily and, alas, eagerly lapse to the lower levels. Will not young women understand that, if they suffer standards to be lowered, if they for any reason yield to the temptation to be their poorer, unworthier selves in the sight of men, then will they corrupt men, then will they in very truth have broken faith with the moral order which has vested womanhood with the supreme privilege of exalting standards and by the exalting of standards exalting men.
I have said nothing up to this time about the place of God in the life of youth. I never feel it my duty to urge you to believe in God as if faith in God, as if trust in God, as if the acceptance of God were a task to be superimposed rather than a privilege to be coveted. To young men and women I would say that the one thing in the world they may not omit to do is to leave room for God in their lives. But you cannot leave room for God if your life be choked and clogged with things, and things, and things. Leave a place in your life for the spirit of God and God will find his way into your life and lead you to the making of a life divine.
Reviewing what has gone before, the great thing in life is to map it out in youth. Not that one is to refrain from venturing upon the uncharted sea but that, howsoever daringly one is ready to fare forth upon the seas, one may not forget the guidance of the stars. It is a great thing to venture upon the imperiling seas of life without the assurance of safety and reward for one’s plans and toils. It is a greater thing so to fare forth as to come inevitably under the direction of the fixed stars in the heavens of the spirit divine.
Upon a stained window in the dwelling of a noble friend I came upon some lines which I commend to the soul of youth everywhere:
“Climb high Climb far Your goal the sky Your aim the star.”
II
MATURITY: HOW TO SERVE AND ACHIEVE
Maturity, or the middle period of life, is in a sense the largest part of life, and is not to be viewed merely as the period after youth and before old age. It is relative only as all time is relative, but it is absolute, too. In truth, it is the time of that self-dependence which comes with the consciousness of power in maturity. It is the very body and substance of life and least relative,—for youth is its foreshadowing and old age the shadow which it casts behind. Middle age is not a link between youth and old age, but that period of life to which youth is an approach,—from which old age is an exit. Comparing life to a bridge, youth and old age might be likened to the piers which must be builded, but the linking together of the piers, the stretching of the cables over which the larger part of life’s pilgrimage must be made is the task of life’s middle period.
Life is so constituted that it were almost within the limits of reasonableness to urge that life need not pass out of the middle stage into old age. Loath though one be to enter upon maturity, it need never be left behind in return for age if it be entered upon in the spirit of preparedness. Middle age is hard and bitter if youth have been misspent, if youth have not been the stage of conscious preparation for life.
Certain rules have been laid down for the governance of youth and the question may be asked whether these are pertinent to the needs and tasks of middle age,—namely the law that one must have an ideal by which to live, and that one must not merely live by it but up to it. As for the rules which are to be binding upon the middle period of life, who shall venture to prescribe them, save that certain things are obviously true,—that middle age shall continue that which youth initiates, and that there shall be no sharp frontier dividing youth from that which comes after. For middle age is not so much a part of life as it is life, and life absolute.
Middle age is but a part of the same life-long journey which in its early stages is youth, which culminates in age. And yet in a sense a different type of rules and ordinances is applicable to every one of the three great periods of life. For life is not a journey, even and unvarying, over a wide plain. Life may best be likened to the ascent of a mountain and in turn the descent from its summit, and the laws that govern life must be variously modified in order to meet the needs of the different periods along the journey.
In the early stages, during the hours of the ascent, the imperative thing is that a man shall not over-tax his strength, that he shall not overstrain his powers in the initial stages of the journey, that he shall not attempt too much, that he shall not travel at too wearying a pace. As man nears the summit of the mountain, it becomes needful for him to conform to other rules. He must not lose the stride, he must know how to go on, he must climb and climb without succumbing to the heat of the day. Once the descent is begun, yet other rules apply, if one is with safety to reach the end of the long journey. The glory of the morning no longer upbears him, the splendor of the noonday sun no longer maintains his strength. But as he leaves youth’s vigor and the power of maturity behind him, the glow of the passing day may irradiate his vision and reveal to him the distant horizon.
Middle age seems too often a painful reluctance to leave youth behind and to be a more painful hesitancy in the matter of facing the oncoming of age. Unhappily for itself, middle age oft combines the childishness of immaturity with the senescence of post-maturity so that it lacks alike the charm of youth and the grace of age. Old age that is not worthy of reverence is contemptible. Not less worthy of contempt is middle age, if it have brought from youth nothing save youth’s foibles and frailties. We not unseldom see—and it is always a pitiful spectacle,—men and women whose bark of life is unballasted by the poise that comes with strength and unsteadied by the serenity which ought to be the mark of the maturer period. While men speak of the dignity of old age, it is in truth the middle age which is in need of dignity, which alas it too often lacks.
Men frequently refer to the emptiness and the barrenness of old age, when it is oftenest middle age that is empty and meaningless, for it is the time when life’s emptiness is disclosed. It is in middle age that men are made to face the bitter truth that theirs is not to achieve and to serve because they have not set up any standards worthy of the name, because their goal, such as it is, is too immediately accessible, and they cannot serve because self, having been their very deity, has not suffered them to will to serve or to learn how to serve.
The temptation of middle age is to yield to the spirit of disenchantment, though verily that is oft-times called disenchantment which means nothing more than the absence of enchantments. The temptation of middle age is not so much to give up ideals as to realize that one is without them. Then men mistake their poor plans and plottings, their puny purposes for ideals and wonder why they have lost that which in truth they never had. Men rarely lose ideals. Poor, imperfect substitutes for ideals are found out and find out their owners,—if so they may be named. Men are not to fear losing ideals in middle age. They are to fear not having them in youth so that they cannot hold them throughout life.
Middle age depends upon youth, and its disillusionments are due chiefly to the absence of illusions in the time of youth. In middle and in old age men suddenly discover that they cannot reap what in youth they have failed to sow. That middle age finds the ideals of youth unsatisfying and even unengrossing, indicts only youth and not itself, shows that the map of life, if drawn at all and as drawn in youth, was not ample and generous enough to have proved sufficing for a lifetime.
Assuming that middle age is less joyous than youth, it enjoys one supreme satisfaction, or rather reaps one supreme compensation, that of the consciousness of two powers, two of life’s sovereign powers, the power to achieve and the power to serve. If youth initiates, middle age most achieves and best serves,—most achieves because it is a time of fullness of intellectual strength and firmness of moral will; best serves because the stains of self have been or ought to have been burnt out and there is left the capacity of selfless enlistment under banners unrelated to personal gain or private advantage. The middle age that men find bare and unsatisfying is in truth that to them who have not mastered the two arts of life, achieving and serving.
Certain mistakes are not uncommon in respect of the interpretation of middle age, for example, that it is not the period of high initiative. Because things are not initiated with dash and flare, it is assumed that middle age undertakes nothing. On the contrary, it is then and perhaps only then that things are begun and achieved for their own sake, that things are really undertaken in the consciousness of strength and with a capacity for achievement. Moreover, while little can be carried into and beyond middle age that is not initiated in youth, the soul of man has not in the middle period forfeited or abandoned the power of self-correction and self-redemption. It may not be easy, neither is it impossible.
Perhaps the supreme rule for middle age may be phrased in the fewest of words,—_don’t stop growing_! Physical and intellectual maturity are not interchangeable terms. The truth is that men almost consciously cease to grow, and even will not to grow at thirty-five and forty and forty-five and then proceed to wonder why life is so unsatisfying. Let men but remember that there is no such thing as maturity in life,—if maturity mean the cessation of growth,—for maturity were followed by post-maturity, which is over-ripeness.
Men need never cease to grow and mature. Men will either grow up or go down. The great and satisfying lives are those of men and women who grow on and go on until they are cut down. When Freeman died, he asked that on his gravestone be carved the words, “He died learning.” He who grows and learns dies not. Continue, as long as thou wouldst grow, to learn and reason and purpose, nor yet imagine that life is done when youth is ended. Nor let the middle-aged forget that going on is not the only possibility. Even in middle age a man may reserve for himself freedom, freedom of choice, freedom to revise life’s foundations, freedom to begin anew if so be error have been made.
Above all, middle age must not lose its admirations, its reverences, its enthusiasms. The edge of enthusiasm may be dulled with the passing of the years,—but the body and substance of one’s admirations need not be diminished, and by our admirations we live. Anatole France, speaking of the old campaigners of the Reserve, uses this finely stimulating word with regard to them,—“they unite the elasticity of youth with the staunchness of maturity.” There is another and an older way of describing the characteristic quality of middle age, which must combine “the wisdom of age and the heart of youth.”
III
AGE: HOW NOT TO GROW OLD
“But why, you ask me, should this tale be told To men grown old, or who are growing old? It is too late! Ah, nothing is too late Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate.
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What, then? Shall we sit idly down and say The night hath come; it is no longer day? The night hath not yet come; we are not quite Cut off from labor by the failing light; Something remains for us to do or dare; Even the oldest tree some fruit may bear.
* * * * *
For age is opportunity no less Than youth itself, though in another dress, And as the evening twilight fades away The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.”
—LONGFELLOW: _Morituri Salutamus_.
Old age depends largely upon the attitude of men toward the whole of life. Old age is not a joke nor a bore nor a trial nor a calamity, though it may be any one of these as all of life may be. But what needs to be stressed is that old age has no content in itself apart from the whole of life. Old age may be as nothing else a foretaste of the kingdom of heaven where faith and hope may meet and love crown all. But little can come to old age that was not in and throughout life. Alas for the old age of the self-centered and self-serving! If life have built walls that shut out, these cannot be razed by age, which will forever have made itself captive.
The crown of old age is a term that trips lightly from our tongues. Are we not in danger of forgetting that there must be something to crown? For in old age inheres no magic to redeem and transfigures all that has gone before. Old age purges the precious metal of life’s substance of its debasing dross, but the precious substance must be there to be purged. Age, like happiness, is neither to be sought nor evaded. It is a by-product of life rather than life’s end. Not the aim nor goal of life, but the way of life must it be.
In the matter of reverencing old age, we rest historically upon the firmest Jewish foundation. For the Jew as no other man before or after him taught the world how to magnify childhood and to glorify old age,—to rise up before the hoary head and honor the face of the old man. And this revering solicitude for the aged is still one of the marks of Jewish life. Jewish teaching has urged and Jewish practice has confirmed the truth that blessing rests upon that home in which the aged have found shelter.
Indeed, one is almost disposed to hold that there is a possibility of overdoing reverence for old age as old age, of becoming indiscriminating in the honor which one metes out to the hoary head. If the people of Israel have erred in any part with respect to old age, they have revered the aged head too much irrespective of the head and the man. I would not if I could break with that fine tradition, but, sometimes, it were well to ask whether old age is to be respected as a virtue in itself, whether length of days should be regarded as a merit apart from what has gone before. Old age is judged compassionately on the principle that nothing but the good should be spoken touching the dead or the nearly dead.
One is sometimes moved to believe that if the aged are unhappy it is because age brings with it not only opportunity for quiet meditation and serene retrospect, but the necessity of thinking about the great issues of life. And many of us have never learned how to think. We have put off the evil day of taking thought upon life so that, when it at last comes, its imminence appalls. Men and women put off their questions and their problems to the end of life and when the end is nearly come, they lack the strength and will to think them through. The need of solutions is then cruelly pressed upon unpracticed and undisciplined minds.
Though I ask the question, how to grow old and how not to grow old, are we not, if we will be frank, more interested in the question how not to grow old than how to grow old? In the question, pressing a little farther, how to seem not to grow old rather than how not grow old? Seeming not to grow old may be attained by artificial means. Not to grow old may be achieved by inward grace alone. Need it be said that no one is ever deceived by external methods of averting age, nor is any one profited or helped save perhaps the chemist and the dye-maker, save the babblers and praters of new substitutes for old faiths? Whosoever thinks of old age aright, whosoever has fitted himself for the dignity of the burden of many days will resort neither to renewing cosmetics nor novel cults as a refuge from old age.
Men speak of the penalties of old age and penalties there are, but what of its rewards, rich and abundant and wondrous, richer indeed in most cases than its desert? The old, because they are old, are treated for the most part as if they were travelers returning richly laden with stores of varied treasures from a voyage over remotest seas to some strange and wondrous spot. Old age in itself is no more a reward than a penalty. And yet what rewards, paraphrasing Shakespeare, accompany old age, and how fitting that these rewards, friendship-bearing, honor-bringing, should wait upon what might elsewise be life’s melancholy end!
The truth is that old age is not a period of rewards nor penalties in themselves. It is a time of duties, as every period offers life’s cup with duties brimming o’er. Duties there are,—but there are privileges beyond estimate. And the privilege of privileges is to offer an example to others in all ways and most of all in the way of facing life with serenity. Finer far for old age to claim its duties than to enjoy its privileges for the old ought to shun being pitied as weak and seek rather to be admired as strong and honored as serene.
When old age has the grace of exalting duty and subordinating privilege, it ceases to be the period of mute resignation. From one point of view, it is the age of resignation, for one wittingly resigns in part what death is wholly to take away, but, be it made clear, resignation is not inaction, renunciation is not willlessly surrendering torpor. These things imply will, action, choice, not merely an awaiting of the end without murmur or complaint. For old age waits not but wills; old age surrenders not but whilst life is renders return for life.
While different types of laws seem to obtain for youth, maturity and old age, these yet are one and one spirit seems to pervade and dominate all. Let youth hold high its aim and pursue high aims through holy means. Let maturity serve and achieve and above all achieve only that it may serve with unimpaired admiration and undimmed ideals. And let old age be nobly wise and unafraid and unselfish to the end!
Much, if not everything, of the content of old age depends on the things for which one cares. If one care for the things that cannot survive youth or middle age, whose value is inevitably lessened with the flight of years, then old age must become barren and empty. Whether your old age is to be void and meaningless depends almost wholly not upon what you have and care for at seventy or eighty, but what it was you sought to have at twenty, what you cared for at thirty, what you cherished at forty. Certain things may be harmless, even admirable in themselves, and yet are destined to be woefully disappointing if they are suffered to become the pursuits of a lifetime and men give themselves to things for which they cannot care when the years have multiplied.
Myopia may interfere with one’s zest for looking upon motion pictures, limbs may become too rheumatic for dancing, tragic though this may sound, the hazard of games of chance may lose its fascination, even money-making, the accumulation of things, may pall or become impossible. But certain things there are that can never grow stale nor wearying nor seem unprofitable. Upon these let men fix their vision and their aim, the pleasures of the mind, the tasks of the spirit, the possibilities of serving. It is almost life’s greatest danger that life will be lived with care for things interest in which cannot survive youth and middle age. What if a man were so to train himself physically that he could run and do nothing else, so that after the period of running had passed, he could not walk! Would not such modus vivendi seem unwise and sadly blundering?
Would you avoid growing old? Do you will even to seem not to grow old? Then have a vision of life and amid a multiplicity of things have and hold, cherish and pursue an ideal. To the man of ideals, to the man who in other words lives, age comes not. Age cannot touch nor wither nor blast the life pervaded and smitten through by ideals. Would you grow old, or rather would you not grow old, then live, and live by the stars. Such are the lives of the unaging. In order not to grow old, I say again, grow on in faith and hopefulness, in vision and serviceableness. Being without these things, some men cannot grow old, they are old. Unhappily for them, they were born old, as other men, whatever be the number of their years, die young. Having these things, age cannot ravage the spirit.