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,