ld, we must think that God has, for
certain wise reasons, judged it best for us that they should not be
exercised; and we must be content to render him the service of others.
In this respect, then, the immediate prospect for middle age is not so
much change as steadfastness. Fortune will not suit herself to our
wishes: we must learn to suit our wishes to her.

But go on a little farther, and what are the things which must come to
pass then? A new and most solemn interest arising to us in the entrance
of our children into active life. Hitherto they have lived under our
care, and our duty to them was simple; but now there comes the choice of
a profession, the watching and guiding them, as well as we can, at this
critical moment of their course. What cares await us here; and yet what
need of avoiding over care! What a trial for us, how we value our
children's worldly interests when compared with their eternal--whether
we prefer for them the path which may lead most readily to worldly
wealth and honour, or that in, which they may best and safest follow
Christ! This is a danger which will come to pass to us ere long: do we
watch and pray that we may be delivered from it?

The interest of life, which had, perhaps, something begun to fade for
ourselves, will revive with vigour at this period in behalf of our
children; but after this it will go on steadily ebbing. What life can
offer we have tasted for ourselves; we have seen it tasted, or in the
way to be tasted, by them. The harvest is gathered, and the symptoms of
the fall appear. Is it that some faculty becomes a little impaired, some
taste a little dulled; or is it that the friends and companions of our
life are beginning to drop away from us? Long since, those whom we loved
of the generation before us have been gathered to the grave; now those
of our own generation are falling fast also--brothers, sisters, friends
of our early youth, a wife, a husband. We are surrounded by a younger
generation, to whom the half of our lives, with all their recollections
and sympathies, are a thing unknown. Impatience, weariness, a clinging
to the past, a vain wish to prolong it in an earthly future,--these are
the things which shall befal us then: and they will befal us too surely,
and too irresistibly, unless, by earlier watchfulness and prayer, we may
have been enabled to avoid them. For vain will it be, with faculties at
once weakened by the decay of nature and perverted by long habits