read over your essay now at thirty, and tell us what you think of it.  And you, clever, warm-hearted, enthusiastic young preacher of twenty-four, wrote your sermon; it was very ingenious, very brilliant in style, and you never thought but that it would be felt by mature-minded Christian people as suiting their case, as true to their inmost experience.  You could not see why you might not preach as well as a man of forty.  And if people in middle age had complained, that, eloquent as your preaching was, they found it suited them better and profited them more to listen to the plainer instructions of some good man with gray hair, you would not have understood their feeling, and you might perhaps have attributed it to many motives rather than the true one.  But now at five-and-thirty, find out the yellow manuscript, and read it carefully over; and I will venture to say, that, if you were a really clever and eloquent young man, writing in an ambitious and rhetorical style, and prompted to do so by the spontaneous fervor of your heart and readiness of your imagination, you will feel now little sympathy even with the literary style of that early composition,—­you will see extravagance and bombast, where once you saw only eloquence and graphic power.  And as for the graver and more important matter of the thought of the discourse, I think you will be aware of a certain undefinable shallowness and crudity.  Your growing experience has borne you beyond it.  Somehow you feel it does not come home to you, and suit you as you would wish it should.  It will not do.  That old sermon you cannot preach now, till you have entirely recast and rewritten it.  But you had no such notion when you wrote the sermon.  You were satisfied with it.  You thought it even better than the discourses of men as clever as yourself, and ten or fifteen years older.  Your case was as though the youthful calf should walk beside the sturdy ox, and think itself rather bigger.

Let no clever young reader fancy, from what has been said, that I am about to make an onslaught upon clever young men.  I remember too distinctly how bitter, and indeed ferocious, I used to feel, about eleven or twelve years ago, when I heard men of more than middle age and less than middling ability speak with contemptuous depreciation of the productions and doings of men considerably their juniors, and vastly their superiors,—­describing them as boys, and as clever lads, with looks of dark malignity.  There are few more disgusting sights than the envy and jealousy of their juniors, which may be seen in various malicious, commonplace old men; as there is hardly a more beautiful and pleasing sight than the old man hailing and counselling and encouraging the youthful genius which he knows far surpasses his own.  And I, my young friend of two-and-twenty, who, relatively to you, may be regarded as old, am going to assume no preposterous airs of superiority.  I do not claim to be a bit wiser than you; all I claim is to