avid of the "topless grandeurs" of life, and we return to find that the
spiritual satisfactions we sought were all the time within very easy reach.
And in cultivating those satisfactions intensively we make another
discovery. We find that this is the true way to the "topless grandeurs"
themselves, for those topless grandeurs are not without us but within.

But I am afraid I am sermonising, and I do not want to sermonise, though if
ever a man may be allowed to sermonise it is when he is completing his
half-century. Let me as an antidote recall a little story which the present
Bishop of Chester once told me over the dinner table, for it contains a
practical recipe for keeping the heart young. He was in his earlier days
associated with Archdeacon Jones of Liverpool. The Archdeacon, then over
eighty, had been tutor to Gladstone, and one day the future Bishop turned
the conversation into a reminiscent channel, and sought to evoke the
Archdeacon's memories of the long past. Presently the Archdeacon abruptly
changed the subject by asking, "What was the concert of the Philharmonic
like last night?" And then, in answer to the obvious surprise which the
question had aroused, he added, "Although I am an old man, I want to keep
my heart young, and the best way of doing that is not to let one's thoughts
live in the past, but to keep them in tune with the life around one."

The truth is that every stage of the journey has its own interests.
Probably none is better than another, but my own preference has always been
for that stage which I happen to be doing at the time. When I was twenty I
thought there was no age like twenty, and now I am fifty I have transferred
my enthusiasm to fifty. There is no age like it, I feel, for all-round
enjoyment. And I have a strong conviction that if I have the good fortune
to reach sixty I shall be found declaring that there is no age like sixty.
And why not? It is pleasant to see the sun on the morning hills, but it is
not less pleasant to walk home when the shadows are lengthening and the