e the prophecies of the
soul, and no religious assurance lights and lifts up his mind, how he
wishes for some fountain of restoration that shall bring back his bloom
and his strength, and make him always young! "Why have such experiences
as decline, and decay, and death?" he asks. "Is it not good for us to be
ever young? Why should not the body be a tabernacle of constant youth,
and life be always thus fresh, and buoyant, and innocent, and confiding?
Or, if we must, at last, die, why all this sad experience,--this
incoming of weakness,--this slipping away of life and power?"

But this is a feeling which no wise or good man ever cherishes long,
for he knows that the richest experiences, and the best achievements of
life, come after the period of youth; spring out of this very sadness,
and suffering, and rough struggle in the world, which an unthinking
sentimentality deplores. Ah, my friends, in spite of our trials,
our weariness, our sad knowledge of men and things; in spite of the
declining years among which so many of us are standing, and the tokens
of decay that are coming upon us; nay, in spite even of our very sins;
who would go back to the hours of his youthful experience, and have the
shadow stand still at that point upon the dial of his life? Who, for the
sake of its innocence and its freshness, would empty the treasury of his
broader knowledge, and surrender the strength that he has gathered in
effort and endurance? Who, for its careless joy, would exchange the
heart-warm friendships that have been annealed in the vicissitudes of
years,--the love that sheds a richer light upon our path, as its vista
lengthens, or has drawn our thoughts into the glory that is beyond the
veil? Nay, even if his being, has been most frivolous and aimless, or
vile,--in the penitent throb with which this is felt to be so, there is
a. spring of active power which exists not in the dreams of the
youth; and the sense of guilt and of misery is the stirring, of a life
infinitely deeper than that early flow of vitality and--consciousness
which sparkles as it runs. Build a tabernacle for perpetual youth, and
say, "It is good to be here?" It cannot be so; and it is well that it
cannot. Our post is not the Mount of Vision, but the Field of Labor; and
we can find no rest in Eden until we have passed through, Gethsemane.

Equally vain is the desire for some condition in life which shall be
free from care, and want, and the burden of toil. I supp