quietly and earnestly, the old story which we all need so much to hear.  And he may still look in at the parish school, and watch the growth of a generation that is to do the work of life when he is in his grave; and kindly smooth the children’s heads; and tell them how One, once a little child, and never more than a young man, brought salvation alike to young and old.  He may still sit by the bedside of the sick and dying, and speak to such with the sympathy and the solemnity of one who does not forget that the last great realities are drawing near to both.  But there are vocations which are all very well for young or middle-aged people, but which do not quite suit the old.  Such is that of the barrister.  Wrangling and hair-splitting, browbeating and bewildering witnesses, making coarse jokes to excite the laughter of common jury-men, and addressing such with clap-trap bellowings, are not the work for gray-headed men.  If such remain at the bar, rather let them have the more refined work of the Equity Courts, where you address judges, and not juries; and where you spare clap-trap and misrepresentation, if for no better reason, because you know that these will not stand you in the slightest stead.  The work which best befits the aged, the work for which no mortal can ever become too venerable and dignified or too weak and frail, is the work of Christian usefulness and philanthropy.  And it is a beautiful sight to see, as I trust we all have seen, that work persevered in with the closing energies of life.  It is a noble test of the soundness of the principle that prompted to its first undertaking.  It is a hopeful and cheering sight to younger men, looking out with something of fear to the temptations and trials of the years before them.  Oh! if the gray-haired clergyman, with less now, indeed, of physical strength and mere physical warmth, yet preaches, with the added weight and solemnity of his long experience, the same blessed doctrines now, after forty years, that he preached in his early prime; if the philanthropist of half a century since is the philanthropist still,—­still kind, hopeful, and unwearied, though with the snows of age upon his head, and the hand that never told its fellow of what it did now trembling as it does the deed of mercy; then I think that even the most doubtful will believe that the principle and the religion of such men were a glorious reality!  The sternest of all touchstones of the genuineness of our better feelings is the fashion in which they stand the wear of years.

But my shortening space warns me to stop; and I must cease, for the present, from these thoughts of Future Years,—­cease, I mean, from writing about that mysterious tract before us:  who can cease from thinking of it?  You remember how the writer of that little poem which has been quoted asks Time to touch gently him and his.  Of course he spoke as a poet, stating the case fancifully,—­but not forgetting, that, when we come to sober sense,