grow old is in reality only the deadening of the pride of life from the dying-down of the life itself.  Many and many a man who passes for a sober, conscientious, religious sort of man at fifty, if you put back into his cooled blood the hot life he had at twenty-five would be the same reckless, profligate, arrogant sinner that he was then.  It is the life, not the pride, that he has lost.  Many and many a man thinks that he has saved his house from conflagration because he, sees no flame, when really the flame is hidden only because the house is burnt down and the fire is still lurking among the ashes, hunting out any little prey that is left and hungrily waiting for more fuel to light up the darkness again.  One thing at least is true, that the goodness of old age in what we may call its passive forms, humility, submission, patience, faith, is necessarily far more hard to recognize and be sure of than the same goodness in a younger man.  What you call piety may be only deadness.

And young men are often pointed just to this old age as the golden time when they will be religious as they cannot be now.  They look to it themselves.  “You are full of the pride of life,” men say to them; “Ah, wait!  By and by the life will flag.  The senses will grow dull, the tastes will stupefy, the enterprise will flicker out, and the days come in which your soul will say ‘I have no pleasure in them.’  Just wait for that!  Then your pride will go too, and then you will need and seek your God.”  It is a poor taunt and a poorer warning.  If you have nothing better to say to make men use their powers rightly than to tell them that they will lose their powers some day, the answer will always be, “Well, I will wait until that losing day comes before I worry.”  If you tell a young man that his life is short, the old bacchanalian answer is the first one, “Live while we live.”  You must somehow get hold of that, you must persuade him that the true life now is the holy life, that life, this same life that he prizes, ought to breed humility and faith, not arrogance and pride, or else you must expect to talk to the winds.  It surely is important that the conversion of the pride of life must come not by the putting-out of life but by making it a source of humility instead of pride.  The humbleness of life.  How can it come?  By clearer and deeper truthfulness to let us see what the real facts of the case are, that is all; but that is very hard, so hard that it can be brought about by no other than the Almighty Holy Ghost.  Let me see that this physical life of mine, having no true character of its own, is made to be a great machinery for simply conducting the knowledge and the love of God into my life; let all my study of the exquisite adaptations of the physical organs for their work be sanctified with this idea, this ever-pervading consciousness that eye and ear and hand are doors for the knowledge and the love of Him to enter by, and that all their marvelous mechanism