generator abides. That central life is
somewhat superior to creation, superior to knowledge and thought, and
contains all its circles. For ever it labors to create a life and
thought as large and excellent as itself; but in vain; for that which
is made instructs how to make a better.

Thus there is no sleep, no pause, no preservation, but all things
renew, germinate and spring. Why should we import rags and relics into
the new hour? Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only
disease: all others run into this one. We call it by many
names,--fever, intemperance, insanity, stupidity and crime: they are
all forms of old age: they are rest, conservatism, appropriation,
inertia; not newness, not the way onward. We grizzle every day. I see
no need of it. Whilst we converse with what is above us, we do not
grow old, but grow young. Infancy, youth, receptive, aspiring, with
religious eye looking upward, counts itself nothing and abandons
itself to the instruction flowing from all sides. But the man and
woman of seventy assume to know all; throw up their hope; renounce
aspiration; accept the actual for the necessary and talk down to the
young. Let them then become organs of the Holy Ghost; let them be
lovers; let them behold truth; and their eyes are uplifted, their
wrinkles smoothed, they are perfumed again with hope and power. This
old age ought not to creep on a human mind. In nature every moment is
new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is
sacred. Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit.
No love can be bound by oath or covenant to secure it against a higher
love. No truth so sublime but it may be trivial to-morrow in the light
of new thoughts. People wish to be settled: only as far as they are
unsettled is there any hope for them.

Life is a series of surprises. We do not guess to-day the mood, the
pleasure, the power of to-morrow, when we are building up our being.
Of lower states,--of acts of routine and sense, we can tell somewhat,
but the masterpieces of God, the total growths and universal movements
of the soul, he hideth; they are incalculable. I can know that truth
is divine and helpful; but how it shall help me I can have no guess,
for _so to be_ is the sole inlet of _so to know_. The new position of
the advancing man has all the powers of the old, yet has them all new.
It carries in its bosom all the energies of the past, yet is itself an
exhalation of the mor