| The Secrets of a Beautiful Life |
Chapter 16 |
Page 6 |
The lesson has its applications, also, for those who are growing old. Old age ought to be the most beautiful period of a good life. Yet not always is it so. There are elements in the experience of old age which make it hard to keep the inner life ever in a state of renewal. The bodily powers are decaying. The senses are growing dull. It is lonely. There is in memory a record of empty cribs and vacant chairs, of sacred mounds in the cemetery. The work of life has dropped from the hands. It is not easy to keep the joy living in the heart in such experiences. Yet that is the problem of true Christian living. While the outward man decays the inward man should be renewed day by day. This is possible, too, as many Christian old people have proved. Keeping near the heart of Christ is again, as always, the secret. Faith gives a new meaning to life. It is seen no more in its relation to earth and what is gone, but in its relation to immortality and what is to come. The Christian old man’s best days are not behind him, but always before him. He is walking, not toward the end, but toward the beginning. The dissolving of the earthly tabernacle is a pledge that the house not made with hands is almost ready.
The lesson has its application also for death. That seems to be the utter destruction of the outer man. The body returns to the dust whence it came. What is the inner life? It only escapes from the walls and fetters which have confined it on the earth. It is as when one tears a bird’s cage apart, and the bird, set free, flies away into the heavens. An old man, nearing his end, spoke of his bodily decay, the tokens of the approach of death, as the land birds lighting on the shrouds, telling the weary mariner that he is nearing the haven. Death is not misfortune, it is not the breaking up of life; it is growth, development, the passing into a larger phase of life. We need death for life’s completing.
“Death is the crown of life;
Were death denied, poor man would live in vain;
Were death denied, to live would not be life;
Were death denied, e’en fools would wish to die.
Death wounds to cure: we fall; we rise; we reign;
Spring from out fetters; hasten to the skies,
Where blooming Eden withers in our sight.
Death gives us more than was in Eden lost;
This king of terrors is the prince of peace.”
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