Myopia may interfere with one’s zest for looking upon motion pictures, limbs may become too rheumatic for dancing, tragic though this may sound, the hazard of games of chance may lose its fascination, even money-making, the accumulation of things, may pall or become impossible. But certain things there are that can never grow stale nor wearying nor seem unprofitable. Upon these let men fix their vision and their aim, the pleasures of the mind, the tasks of the spirit, the possibilities of serving. It is almost life’s greatest danger that life will be lived with care for things interest in which cannot survive youth and middle age. What if a man were so to train himself physically that he could run and do nothing else, so that after the period of running had passed, he could not walk! Would not such modus vivendi seem unwise and sadly blundering?
Would you avoid growing old? Do you will even to seem not to grow old? Then have a vision of life and amid a multiplicity of things have and hold, cherish and pursue an ideal. To the man of ideals, to the man who in other words lives, age comes not. Age cannot touch nor wither nor blast the life pervaded and smitten through by ideals. Would you grow old, or rather would you not grow old, then live, and live by the stars. Such are the lives of the unaging. In order not to grow old, I say again, grow on in faith and hopefulness, in vision and serviceableness. Being without these things, some men cannot grow old, they are old. Unhappily for them, they were born old, as other men, whatever be the number of their years, die young. Having these things, age cannot ravage the spirit.
Such men and women are age-proof, their heads may be silver white, their frames bowed, their limbs palsied, but age they know not,—the men I have in mind, such men as that great physician who, after sixty years and more of unwearied and unrivaled service, is still an impassioned pleader for the right of the child, of the merest, puniest babe. Who will dare say that he is aged, who at fourscore and more spends himself utterly in the service of the least of these? I am thinking of yet another friend of fourscore and more, whose life is nobly dedicated to the furtherance of amity between faith and faith, who serves all men as brothers, who proves that he is a Christian by the love he bears the Jew. And I am thinking of yet another man who likewise has lived for fourscore years, perhaps the foremost educator of our generation, a publicist of matchless felicity in utterance and conduct alike, a man who at eighty and more steps into the arena with all the power and eagerness of youth in order to take up arms on behalf of another great though much wronged servant of the nation.
It was once said of Theodore Parker that he gave himself unreservedly and with abandon to whatever truth, duty, love, the three sublime voices of God,—the real trinity in our souls,—commanded. Truth, duty, love! Have you tried these things? Have you dared to live by them and for them, by and for any one of them? Does not this word bear out what was recently said by a great American physician about a noble social worker,—that individual, who has no object in life, who simply works day by day, with the idea that he is making a dollar and is going to use the dollar for his own comfort, cannot have a very peaceful mind. But if one has an object in life, to attain certain things which will be helpful to others, and whose day is filled with that sort of work, that individual deserves,—and other things being equal,—will have an old age.
Truth, duty, love,—obey their command and when you do you shall find age a fiction and life alone a reality. What if old age be without teeth and eyes if it be not without hope and faith and fadeless memories!
“To suffer and endure,
To keep the spirit pure—
The fortress and abode of holy Truth—
To serve eternal things
Whate’er the issue brings