But yet this mere fulness of life as we all know has its dangers.  Mere health is overbearing by its very nature.  There is a lack of sympathy in it.  Not knowing suffering itself, it is not respectful of suffering in others.  It is not careful of inflicting suffering.  The full blood sings of nothing but itself.  It is careless of others.  It is careless of God, not malignantly cruel, nor deliberately atheistic, but selfish with a sort of self-absorption which is often, very gracious in its forms and infidel with a mere forgetfulness of God.  Who of us does not know, and who of us, wavering between his standards and his feelings, has not very often found it hard to tell just how he ought to value the enthusiastic and arrogant self-sufficiency of healthy youth?

It is this, I take it, that is described here as “the pride of life.”  Wherever there is eager and full-blooded youth there it appears.  It breaks out in the wild and purposeless mob of lower city life, in the impatience and insubordination of the country boy who longs to be free from his father’s farm, in the crude skepticism of college students’ first discussions of religion.  It is jealous of slight, of insult, of the least suspicion of restraint or leading.  It belongs to strong young nations as well as to strong young men.  By it they flaunt defiance in the face of the world and are afraid of the imputation of prudence.  It is what you can see in the faces of any group of eager young men as you pass them on the street.  Sometimes it makes them attractive and sometimes it makes them detestable.  It turns the noble youth into a hero and the mean youth into a bully.  A fine nature it leads into the most exquisite tastes and encircles it with art and music.  A coarse nature it plunges into the vilest debauchery and vice.  In good fortune it makes the temper carelessly benignant.  In bad fortune it makes the temper recklessly defiant.  It works these very different effects but is always the one same spirit still,—­the pride of life.  The gift of life which came from God, taken possession of by the world and tamed into self-sufficiency, a thing not of the Father, but of the world, who does not know in himself, or see in somebody he watches, something of this pure pride in life?  Just to live is so attractive that the higher ends and responsibilities of living drift away out of sight.  This instinctive almost physical selfishness is the philosophy of more than we think both of the good and of the bad that is in young people.

I have seen too much of it to undervalue the sweet and sober piety of old age.  There is a beauty in it that is all its own.  A softness and tenderness and patience and repose in the western sky that the bolder glories of the east where the morning breaks never can attain.  Many and many of the best men we have known have been old men, but no one looks at men’s progress without feeling that a great deal of what passes for growth in goodness as men