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 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