ssed into the
second stage, the training stage for life and for God. Then through a
new crisis you pass on again to new adventures. For God has revealed
that what you call death, the end of this career, is but birth into a
new and more wondrous career which again passes you forward into still
nobler adventures, and that again, perhaps--who knows? Who shall fix
the limit?

* * * * *

Nay, you are not elderly. You are not middle-aged. These are but
comparative terms. A house-fly is elderly in twenty-four hours. An
oak-tree is young after a hundred years. And you, children of eternity
with ages and millenniums before you--you are not even one year old
babies in the light of your great future.

Now do you see why the old apostle of Ephesus did not feel aged or
elderly--why he looked out like an eager boy into the adventure before
him? "Beloved, now are we the sons of God but we don't know yet what
we shall be." Aye, we don't know yet. No more than did the small boys
laughing in their play and going to be soldiers and sailors and
wonderful people. We don't know yet. But it is all before us. And it
is all going to be good because it is in the Father's presence.

So I bid you do what I sometimes do myself, look out into the void and
guess like the children what you shall be when you are older than
Methuselah.

Shake off the dulness and monotony from your life. Don't talk as if
old or middle-aged any more. Be children again in the presence of the
Father, and with happy child hearts keep guessing what you shall be.

* * * * *

I see a woman with the deep pain in her eyes, one of the many mothers
whom I have met in these terrible four years.... They were afraid to
tell her when the War Office telegram came.... He had crept out in the
night to bring in a wounded chum, and the German sniper got him. At
first she could not believe it. It must be some mistake,--some one of
similar name. But the days passed on. And the light died in her eyes
and she became suddenly old. Her prayers ceased. God had disappointed
her. There was nothing left to pray for now. Nothing to be ambitious
for any more. Her boy was dead--buried in a shallow grave in France
with a little wooden cross at his head. And he was only twenty-two!

* * * * *

The awful waste of it! All her loving thought over his childhood--all
her care, her anxiety, her efforts, her prayers that God