eaching did
not die. Her words about the Golden Age never passed out of their
minds. Whatever else they thought concerning it in after years, they
always came back to this--in this they were all agreed--that it is the
presence of Christ that makes the Gold of the Golden Age.

But at this point their agreement came to an end. They could never
agree respecting the time of the Golden Age.

Yestergold believed that it lay in the past. In his esteem the former
times were better than the present. People were simpler then, and
truer to each other and happier. There was more honesty in trade, more
love in society, more religion in life. Many an afternoon he went
alone into the old abbey, where the tombs of saintly ladies, of holy
men, and of brave fighters lay, and as he wandered up and down looking
at their marble images, the gates of the Golden Age seemed to open up
before him. There was one figure, especially, before which he often
stood. It was the figure of a Crusader, his sword by his side, his
hands folded across his breast, and his feet resting on a lion. "Ay,"
he would say, "in that Age the souls of brave men really trod the lion
and the dragon under foot." But when the light of the setting sun came
streaming through the great window in the west, and kindling up the
picture of Christ healing the sick, his soul would leap up for joy, a
new light would come into his eyes, and this thought would rise within
him like a song--"The Golden Age itself--the Age into which all other
Ages open and look back--is pictured there."

But on such occasions, as he came out of the abbey and went along the
streets, if he met the people hastening soiled and weary from their
daily toils, the joy would go out of his heart. He would begin to
think of the poor lives they were leading. And he would cry within
himself, "Oh that the lot of these toiling crowds had fallen on that
happy Age! It would have been easy then to be good. Goodness was in
the very air blessed by His presence. The people had but to see Him to
be glad." And sometimes his sorrow would be for himself. Sometimes,
remembering his own struggles to be good, and the difficulties in his
way, and how far he was from being as good as he ought to be, he would
say, "Would that I myself had been living when Jesus was on the earth."
More or less this wish was always in his heart. It had been in his
heart from his earliest years. Indeed, it is just a speech of his,
m