The interest of life, which had, perhaps, something begun to fade for ourselves, will revive with vigour at this period in behalf of our children; but after this it will go on steadily ebbing.  What life can offer we have tasted for ourselves; we have seen it tasted, or in the way to be tasted, by them.  The harvest is gathered, and the symptoms of the fall appear.  Is it that some faculty becomes a little impaired, some taste a little dulled; or is it that the friends and companions of our life are beginning to drop away from us?  Long since, those whom we loved of the generation before us have been gathered to the grave; now those of our own generation are falling fast also—­brothers, sisters, friends of our early youth, a wife, a husband.  We are surrounded by a younger generation, to whom the half of our lives, with all their recollections and sympathies, are a thing unknown.  Impatience, weariness, a clinging to the past, a vain wish to prolong it in an earthly future,—­these are the things which shall befal us then:  and they will befal us too surely, and too irresistibly, unless, by earlier watchfulness and prayer, we may have been enabled to avoid them.  For vain will it be, with faculties at once weakened by the decay of nature and perverted by long habits of worldliness, to essay, for the first time, to force our way into the kingdom of heaven.  Old age is not the season for contest and victory; nor shall we then be so able to escape unharmed from the temptations of life as to stand before the Son of Man.

These are the things which will come to pass for us and for you.  But for you there is much more to come, which to us is not future now, but past or present.  With you, for a time, it will be all a course forwards and upwards.  From the preparation for life, you will come to the reality; from a state of less importance, you will be passing on to one of greater.  Your temptations, whatever they may be now, will not certainly become weaker.  As outward restraint is more and more taken off from you, so your need of inward restraint will be greater.  Will those who are extravagant now on a small scale, be less extravagant on a large scale?  Will those who are selfish now, become less selfish amidst a wider field of enjoyment?  Will those who know not or care not for Christ, while yet, as it were, standing quietly on the shore, be led to think of him more amidst the excitement of the first setting sail, amidst the interest of the first newly-seen country?

You know not yet, nor can know, the immense importance of that period of life on which many of you are entering, or have just entered.  You are coming, or come, to what may be called the second beginning of life:  to which, in the common course of things, there will succeed no third.  Ignorance, absence of temptation, the presence of all good impressions, constitute much of the innocence of mere childhood,—­so beautiful while it lasts, so sure to be soon blighted!