onditions allow and not lose
heart that it is so little, but also the interpretative and
harmonizing spirit of those who see, beyond the personal ideal and
vision and far beyond the personal achievement, the upward march of
all mankind--not alone the leaders of that march; not alone those who
will and know the upward way, but all who feel the under-current
pressure "toward the better, ever onward toward the best," This
pressure even those feel who fondly imagine they are holding all life
to outgrown patterns, and they prove its power by their unconscious
response.

Another gift of insight they may have who grow old in the spirit of
youth. It is the gift of seeing in one picture those who have come a
long way up the path of progress and those who have but just entered
upon it. The harsh judgments of youth, so tonic and useful, that
measure moral actions by their exact position in ethical perception
(judgment so tonic and useful that youth without that element misses
its own gift to human progress) cease to serve in old age for purposes
of just discrimination. In later life may come the wisdom of
understanding those from whom one differs, the gift of seeing the
helpful interrelations of newer and older "mores" in normal human
development and the glad recognition that even defective moral vision,
though retarding needed changes, may be used by the powers that
balance our complex life to hold, its course steady in chaos of
change. These gifts may add patience and love, sweetness and light, to
the zeal of the reformer and yet not dull his ardor for the next
morning-hour of progress.

Not the old, then, because it is old, nor the new because it is new;
not the few who will hold no parley with that which to them is evil,
nor the many who cling to what they have inherited lest they lose
life's best treasures; not to those who call aloud in the market
place, "Behold the coming of the Lord!" nor to those who sit at the
fireside and cherish their own only; not on or to any one
manifestation of the life in which we have our being can the old, with
the spirit of youth, fibre their faith and trust.

In all the struggling, mistaken, weary, selfish, cowardly, alike as in
all the brave, heroic, unselfish and lovely, is manifestation that
makes "no good thing a failure, no evil thing success." This is the
testimony of a ripe and wise old age. In that they must trust who have
tested the real things of life in the real world of effort,