^ Shortly after entering his ninety-fourth year, Dr. Martineau wrote to his friend Rev. W. Orme White: "In the romantic moods of early enthusiasm the fancy took me that half my present age would amply test even a slippery soul and might well limit our desire of an eligible probation. Am I not reasonably humbled, then, by being judged in need of detention for a doubled test ? And if so, may I perhaps hopefully pray to be not unready for the change of worlds ? I dare not affirm ; I only know that duty and love look more Divine and the spiritual life more surely immortal than when I thought and spoke of them with less experience. The final mood of living Eeligion resolves itself for me into filial trust and undying aspiration. Here I can quietly rest, and in some small measure still actively work, till my call comes and takes me to other scenes." ^
Life! we've been long together, Through pleasant and through cloudy weather.
'Tis hard to part when friends are dear, Perhaps 'twill cost a sigh, a tear.
Then steal away, give little warning,
Choose thine own time; Say not good-night, but in some happier clime,
Bid me good-morning.^
(4) To remember God is power and joy all through life. — Tolstoy said a memorable thing when he wrote, " It is necessary to have a soul." We cannot understand the world without a soul ; we
^ J, Hamilton, Works, iii. 215.
* The Life aiid Letters of James Martineau, ii. 245, ^ Mis. Barbauld,
428 TIMELY REMEMBRANCE
cannot understand ourselves without it. We cannot even make ourselves what we would like to be without attention to the inward part which we call soul. One of the first and greatest powers for the development of the soul is religion. That word denotes what- ever binds us to God, or rather whatever binds us back to God. There is no time in life when religion should have greater power than in youth. Youths sometimes shrink from religion because they believe that it kills all the joy and brightness of life. If they have gathered that from the lives of those who are older, then they who are older have misrepresented it. Keligion suffers from the fact that too often it is only when men have strayed into the far country that, in their misery, they say, " I will arise and go to my Father " ; that is why religion has a gloomy and saddened look. Those who came late have memories of the bitterness of the past to sadden them. They only hope that they will be taken in as hired servants of the Father. We should look at religion through the lives of the few who have never strayed away, who gave their hearts to God when they were young, and live in the fulness of His love and grace.
^ Pathetic and melancholy are the words with which Mr. Frederic Harrison, the leader of English Positivism, ends his Auto- biography : " I close this book with words that indeed resume in themselves all that I have ever written or spoken during half a century, which is this — that all our mighty achievements are being hampered and often neutralised, all our difficulties are being doubled, and all our moral and social diseases are being aggravated by this supreme and dominant fact — that we have suffered our religion to slide from us, and that in effect our age had no abiding faith in any religion at all. The urgent task of our time is to recover a religious faith as a basis of life both personal and social." ^
3. Continual remembrance of God encourages the growth of the spirit. Man does not ripen naturally — that is, according to the course of his earthly nature — for eternity. He is the child of spiritual culture. By spiritual toil and effort only, by patience, by pain, by tears, can this crown of a good old age be won. It comes at the end of a good life-course, a course that has been aspiring and tending to God. It is the fruit of a continual renew- • Frederic Harrison, Autobiographic Memoirs^ ii, 338.
ECCLESIASTES xii. i 429
ing, the strengthening and unfolding of the inner man, which is not born of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of " the word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever," and " which is Christ in you, the hope of glory." And that nature needs close and constant culture ; the weeds in its fields need to be cut down, and their very roots torn up, no matter what sensitive fibres may be lacerated in the process ; while the seeds of the Kingdom, the germs which the good Sower has planted, have to be nurtured with many toils and tears, if in our old age we are to wear the look and bearing of men whose harvest has been reaped and is ready for gathering home into the garners of eternity.
^ No trace of the moroseness of old age appeared in Mr. Gladstone's manners or his conversation, nor did he, though pro- foundly grieved at some of the events which he witnessed, and owning himself disappointed at the slow advance made by a cause dear to him, appear less hopeful than in earlier days of the general progress of the world, or less confident in the beneficent power of freedom to promote the happiness of his country. The stately simplicity which had always charmed those who saw him in private seemed more beautiful than ever in this quiet evening of a long and sidtry day. His intellectual powers were unimpaired, his thirst for knowledge undiminished. But a placid stillness had fallen upon him and his household ; and in seeing the tide of his life begin slowly to ebb, one thought of the lines of his illustrious contemporary and friend :