Part 3

Such men and women are age-proof, their heads may be silver white, their frames bowed, their limbs palsied, but age they know not,—the men I have in mind, such men as that great physician who, after sixty years and more of unwearied and unrivaled service, is still an impassioned pleader for the right of the child, of the merest, puniest babe. Who will dare say that he is aged, who at fourscore and more spends himself utterly in the service of the least of these? I am thinking of yet another friend of fourscore and more, whose life is nobly dedicated to the furtherance of amity between faith and faith, who serves all men as brothers, who proves that he is a Christian by the love he bears the Jew. And I am thinking of yet another man who likewise has lived for fourscore years, perhaps the foremost educator of our generation, a publicist of matchless felicity in utterance and conduct alike, a man who at eighty and more steps into the arena with all the power and eagerness of youth in order to take up arms on behalf of another great though much wronged servant of the nation.

It was once said of Theodore Parker that he gave himself unreservedly and with abandon to whatever truth, duty, love, the three sublime voices of God,—the real trinity in our souls,—commanded. Truth, duty, love! Have you tried these things? Have you dared to live by them and for them, by and for any one of them? Does not this word bear out what was recently said by a great American physician about a noble social worker,—that individual, who has no object in life, who simply works day by day, with the idea that he is making a dollar and is going to use the dollar for his own comfort, cannot have a very peaceful mind. But if one has an object in life, to attain certain things which will be helpful to others, and whose day is filled with that sort of work, that individual deserves,—and other things being equal,—will have an old age.

Truth, duty, love,—obey their command and when you do you shall find age a fiction and life alone a reality. What if old age be without teeth and eyes if it be not without hope and faith and fadeless memories!

“To suffer and endure, To keep the spirit pure— The fortress and abode of holy Truth— To serve eternal things Whate’er the issue brings This is not broken Age, but ageless Youth.”

If then life be centered on self, old age may rest in the certitude of disappointment and disillusion. But if self be centered on life, then may come what Morley described, touching Edmund Burke, as “an unrebellious temper and hopes undimmed for mankind.”

Twofold must be the hope of man,—for a future for self and for the future for all. And when the soul is so freighted with hopes, then shall it be said of a man as it was said of the great poet: “He was one of those on the lookout for every new idea and for every old idea with a new application, which may tend to meet the growing requirements of society; one of those who are like men standing on a watch-tower to whom others apply and say, not ‘What of the night?’ but ‘What of the morning and of the coming day?’”

My one word of counsel is,—let life not be centered on self, for to live for self is to invite cruel disaster in old age. The saddest, in truth the most tragic, lives I know are those of old men and women who have nothing to live for because they have lived for self and self alone,—and self is nothing. Their lives are piteously empty. For the restlessness and excitement of youth may hide this truth, but age, like death, is a revealer. And there are many types of selfishness. I speak of two which must suffice. There are those who live for self,—for selfissimus, giving not the utmost for the highest but all for the nighest,—self, self, self, self’s pleasure and profit and power and vantage and fame. These are the most crude and obvious types of the selfful, who shall pay the penalty of their folly and their moral disease.

But, though it be said to your dismay, there are other types of selfishness, though less obvious,—the selfishness of those who project self into and magnify self in family relationship. For there are those who simply extend the horizon of self enough to include other forms of self, one’s own, one’s nearest, one’s flesh and blood. And here, too, disillusion is bound to come and ought to come, for one’s own cannot and ought not to fill one’s life forever. One might well excuse our mothers and fathers for giving their thought and attention to their own, for these were many and life was hard and life’s struggle ofttimes bitter. But for the fewest is such excuse valid now,—if ever it was valid—especially seeing that we concentrate upon the giving to others of things rather than upon helping others to their highest and best. In truth, people concentrate upon self, upon their own interests and wishes, and these things pass and little or nothing is left in life save self. Live for yourself, and you live two years in one; live in the life of others, and you divide your years with another.

Is not all this a paraphrase of what Emerson has said better than any other? He who loves is in no condition old. Not lives and lives for self, not loves self and self alone, but he who loves! Emerson, building better perhaps than he knew, has voiced the deepest truth of the soul. Love cannot die and love will not let die nor yet grow old. And yet as a final word, and more needed than all else, I would say that there is only one way to grow old, and that too is the only way not to grow old. That way is to know, to love, to serve.

“Grow old along with me! The Best is yet to be, The last of life for which the first was made; Our times are in His hand Who saith, ‘A whole I planned,’ Youth shows but half: Trust God: see all nor be afraid.”