The grey-headed and very aged men.
Grey-headed and aged men
I. Old age presents social contrasts. Some are rich and some are poor. Some have all their wants anticipated and supplied; others are beset with difficulties, which seem to thicken with advancing years.
II. Old age presents physical contrasts. There is an old man, fresh and ruddy, renewing his youth like the eagle. There is another who answers to Solomon’s melancholy description. The cause of this diversity may frequently be found in the past life. “The sins of youth bite sore in age.”
III. Old age presents intellectual contrasts. In most cases age brings its mental as well as its bodily infirmities. The imagination grows dull, the understanding loses its vigour, the power of originating and sustaining thought fails. There is no intellectual sympathy with living thought, nor power of appreciating it. There are instances of intellectual power remaining unimpaired to the last, so that the latest efforts of their possessors have been among their best. Plato continued writing until he was over eighty. Dryden produced his noblest poem when he was near seventy. We generally speak of old age as pregnant with experience; but “great men are not always wise, neither do the aged understand judgment.” Some old people are as foolish as if they had walked through the world with their eyes and ears shut. There are contrasts of temper as well as of intellect. Old age is often fretful. It would seem as if infancy had come again, with all its peevishness, and none of its charms.
IV. Old age presents spiritual contrasts. The hoary head is sometimes a crown of glory. But there are old sinners as well as old saints. Some men are a terrible curse to society. And a sinful old age is often a miserable old age. This is especially the case where the besetting sin is covetousness. One lesson for all. If you live to be old, your old age will be very much what you are pleased to make it. Your moral and spiritual character rests with yourselves. (William Walters.)
The old faith and the new experience
The Catholic doctrine has not yet been struck out that will fuse in one commanding law the immemorial convictions of the race and the widening visions of the living soul. The agitation of the Church today is caused by the presence within her of Eliphaz and Job--Eliphaz standing for the fathers and their faith, Job passing through a fever crisis of experience and finding no remedy in the old interpretations. The Church is apt to say, Here is moral disease, sin; we have nothing for that but rebuke and aversion. Is it wonderful that the tried life, conscious of integrity, rises in indignant revolt? The taunt of sin, scepticism, rationalism, or self-will is too ready a weapon, a sword worn always by the side or carried in the hand. (R. A. Watson.)
The aged that linger in the world
Sometimes the sun seems to hang for a half hour in the horizon, only just to show how glorious it can be. The day is done, the fervour of the shining is over, and the sun hangs golden--nay redder than gold--in the west, making everything look unspeakably beautiful with its rich effulgence, which it sheds on every side. So God seems to let some people, when their duty in this world is done, hang in the west that men may look at them and see how beautiful they are. There are some hanging in the west now. (H. W. Beecher.)