with skepticism, and tired with speculation, he cries out for
that faith that needed no other confirmation than the tones
of a mother's voice, and found God everywhere in the soft
pressure of her love; and when his steps begin to hesitate,
and he finds himself among the long shadows, and the frailty
and fear of the body overcome 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