f such remain at the bar, rather let them
have the more refined work of the Equity Courts, where you
address judges, and not juries; and where you spare clap-trap and
misrepresentation, if for no better reason, because you know that these
will not stand you in the slightest stead. The work which best befits
the aged, the work for which no mortal can ever become too venerable and
dignified or too weak and frail, is the work of Christian usefulness and
philanthropy. And it is a beautiful sight to see, as I trust we all have
seen, _that_ work persevered in with the closing energies of life. It
is a noble test of the soundness of the principle that prompted to its
first undertaking. It is a hopeful and cheering sight to younger men,
looking out with something of fear to the temptations and trials of the
years before them. Oh! if the gray-haired clergyman, with less now,
indeed, of physical strength and mere physical warmth, yet preaches,
with the added weight and solemnity of his long experience, the same
blessed doctrines now, after forty years, that he preached in his
early prime; if the philanthropist of half a century since is the
philanthropist still,--still kind, hopeful, and unwearied, though with
the snows of age upon his head, and the hand that never told its fellow
of what it did now trembling as it does the deed of mercy; then I think
that even the most doubtful will believe that the principle and the
religion of such men were a glorious reality! The sternest of all
touchstones of the genuineness of our better feelings is the fashion in
which they stand the wear of years.

But my shortening space warns me to stop; and I must cease, for the
present, from these thoughts of Future Years,--cease, I mean, from
writing about that mysterious tract before us: who can cease from
thinking of it? You remember how the writer of that little poem which
has been quoted asks Time to touch gently him and his. Of course he
spoke as a poet, stating the case fancifully,--but not forgetting, that,
when we come to sober sense, we must prefer our requests to an Ear more
ready to hear us and a Hand more ready to help. It is not to Time that I
shall apply to lead me through life into immortality! And I cannot think
of years to come without going back to a greater poet, whom we need not
esteem the less because his inspiration was loftier than that of the
Muses, who has summed up so grandly in one comprehensive sentence all
the possibiliti