Girlhood is the step in advance, and suggestive of the opening bud which promises fulness of beauty to come.
Old age, that last stage in Life’s journey, ought to be the season of ripe wisdom, the period when everything that is good in us should be at its best, despite our failing bodily powers. Naturally, then, the sight of soured, unlovable, or degraded old age shocks us most of all, on account of its almost hopelessness. There is so little likelihood of any change for the better.
A bad habit long indulged in is a tyrant whose claim has been tightening round its wearer with every day’s indulgence in it. How small a chance is there that its hold will be relaxed in the time of hoar hairs and bodily weakness.
Let us look together at some types of old age, those which we admire, revere, love, and long to imitate, and others which make the very thought of age repulsive. From such a contemplation you must turn to yourselves, my dear ones, and search your hearts and lives in order that you may find out what they promise for that, to you, far-away future, old age.
If you discover the germs of an evil growth which will reach maturity with hoar hairs if left to increase, and will make your latest days a trouble to yourselves and to others, do not rest until you have exterminated them.
On the contrary, you must cherish every thought and aspiration after what is higher, holier, better, and more in harmony with the teaching of our perfect Pattern. The longings must find expression in prayer that they may become habits, which will grow and cling to you and gain strength daily, until the end of your earthly lives.
A good old age! What a beautiful expression this is! A Bible phrase applied, however, to very few even of the most famous of Bible characters.
Some of us may be apt to think that it merely refers to the great number of a person’s years. Surely this cannot be the only qualification for a good old age; for if so, it would have been written of Methuselah, the oldest man that ever walked this earth. His days were nine hundred and sixty-nine years. “And he died.” But of his father, who did not attain to half that age, we are told, “He walked with God and was not; for God took him.”
Abraham, again, was less than half the age of Enoch when he died “in a good old age.”
David, the man after God’s own heart, died, we are told, “in a good old age, full of days, riches, and honour.”