PART IV.
HOW TO GROW OLD.
“The hoary head is a crown of glory if it be found in the way of righteousness.”—Proverbs xvi. 31.
You, my dear girl friends, will not have forgotten our last talk about growing old, or that we left the most important part of it for this evening. We then dealt with externals, yet we realised that these were the outcome of our inner selves, and inseparable from them.
Let me ask you to impress on your memories the text I have just quoted—
“The hoary head is a crown of glory if it be found in the way of righteousness.”
There is no glory in gray hairs unless accompanied by the holy, Christ-like life. On the contrary, anything in a character which is pitiable, degrading, impure, or contemptible, seems more lamentable in old age than at any other period of life. Childhood is emphatically the “age of innocence,” or ought to be such. Of the children those sweet lines were written:
“They’ve the least taint of earthly sod;
They’re freshest from the hand of God,”
and even when their young minds have been polluted and their simplicity smirched through evil surroundings, there is room for hope that in the years to come the seeds of evil may be uprooted, and the stains removed.