Men in the Making | Page 3

you never will; or that you will not go far if you do? The enthusiasms of old men are as rare as they are short-lived, unless they are evolved out of earlier and worthy days.
There may be exceptions. If there are, I have never known one. The rule is practically a law, that old men, who are nothing more than old men, cannot make mighty resolves and carry them through. They may, for many reasons, start out from Ur of the Chaldees; but it is not often they get past Haran, if, indeed, they ever get so far. More likely will it end in the old defeat: "I will return into the house whence I came out," which is much the same, or, in some cases, is even worse, than if they had never left it. The old man Terah would get an interesting tour; although very probably people would hear from him more about it at the end than he had ever seen on the way. He would be a much-travelled man for those days, but he never found the new religion. It was the old religion that re-found him.
Understand me: I am far from saying that old age necessarily blocks the way to great attempts, or to conspicuous success in them. All history would cry out against such a statement. There is an old age we delight to honour, and which reverses the ordinary attitude to it in the general world. Instead of considering it a legitimate matter for lying about, and polite not to be aware of its presence, we make our boast in the virility which, in some men, accompanies their years until they quite shade out in a mellow maze of glory.
Take some of our statesmen. Were not the mighty men of the great nineteenth century aged men, if we count age only by shadows on the dial? At a time of life when most men are honoured with a natural right to senility, Mr. Gladstone was girding on his armour for one of the biggest conflicts ever waged in the arena of our Parliament. And years after, as the struggle still raged--to see him, almost blind and deaf, looking like so much vitalized parchment rather than a figure of flesh and blood, as night after night he stood up to the agility of a Chamberlain, and the subtlety of a Balfour--each perfected to a fine art--surely never gamer, grander sight ever challenged the imagination of poet, patriot, or historian. It was a testimony to all time of what can come out of the brain and soul of a man, when the body that houses them is written and re-written over with the hieroglyphics of age. It was a fitting termination to what may be, and ought to be, the great and sacred processes of life.
But Mr. Gladstone was great at the end, because all the way had been a preparation for it. This is the secret, if secret it be, which young men cannot know and master too soon. To end well, you must begin well; and you must fill in well the distance between the one and the other. Study carefully the triumph of old age in statesmanship, in science, and in affairs, and you will have to connect them with years of stern discipline and strenuous endeavour. In no case will you find strength where there has been no strain, or palm where there has been no dust. There are levels on which the truth, that "we reap what we sow," admits of no qualification. Omnipotence itself cannot make it possible for us to gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles. To attempt after a given age, and on the strength of a chance impulse, to leave Ur of the Chaldees with its old habits and associations, its old moral settings, will carry us far as the impulse lasts, but that in all probability will be only as far as Haran. And as Terah died at Haran, so shall we. It will be from moon to moon. Youth is the time to determine whether old age shall be a beautiful consummation, or a bitter regret. The threshold of manhood is the place to form resolutions that will have some chance of being kept, to cultivate the thoughts you would have ultimately become things. The serious danger is that, with the impression of a long future before you, you should merely drift in the present, and forget how inextricably the texture of to-day will be woven into the fabric of to-morrow.
I am quite aware that what I have so far said is more likely to hinder than help the purpose I have in saying it. You will not question that a clear nexus runs through our years, but my teaching about it,