Youth Renewed in Age

“But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; and they shall walk and not faint.”

Compared with Psalm ciii. 5.

“Who satisfieth thy mouth with good things; so that thy youth is renewed like the eagle’s.”

Statues would be erected to the man who could disclose the secret of a happy Old Age. For while the most of mankind desire longevity, the judgment is equally universal that the decline of life is painful. The same law, however we may expound it, which binds over the entire race to dissolution, makes the avenues to death full of terror. The sentimentahsm and poetry of our day, in a vain contest with the nature

* N”ew York, January 20, 1850.

of things, would hang garlands over the grave, and educate the rising race in a persuasion that death has no horrors. But nature, how often soever driven out, persists in returning. We dread death; and we dread that old age which procrastinates it. Such is our dilemma. Viewed from the terrestrial side, the fearful object is seen aright. It is revelation, and grace confirmed to us by revelation, which clear the prospect. In what manner this is effected will be made apparent, if we consider these two statements included in our text. 1. That Old Age is naturally a time of weakness and trouble; but, 2. That Christian confidence and hope in God give freshness, strength and joy, even in the period of Old Age.

I. Old Age is naturally a time of weakness and trouble. We see it for ourselves; even if we have not begun to feel it. Till lifted out of the common track of opinion, every one looks on the aged as withdrawn from the path of happiness. Civilization and its refinements have undoubtedly elevated the condition of the aged, as truly as of the female sex. Yet even this is often no more than a dehcate feigning; for if rank, wealth, place and power be abstracted, there is nothing reverential in such appellations as “the old man” and “the old woman.” In this country, at least, we are on this head more Athenians than Lacedemonians. Of a surety we do not imitate the Hebrew, who is taught to rise up before the hoary head. Universally we attach to old age associations of debility and consequent mthdrawal from the arena of excitement and the bower of mirth. The old man’s faculties are dim, and his susceptibiUties are obtunded. He is left out of the programme of entertainment. If called to feasting, he is expected to say with Barzillai: “Can I hear any more the voice of singing men and singing women?” In a great number of instances, also, age is regarded as a disqualification for active service. And these results strike us more forcibly in those ruder states of society where nature presents its nude reality. All the history, all the fiction, all the observation of the world, ascribe to this stage of the human journey much of shadow, cloud, and obstruction. As it respects the fact, the case is not otherwise presented by Scripture. These are the days in which the weary one says: “I have no pleasure in them.” If lengthened out, “yet is their strength labour and sorrow.” “Surely every man walketh in a vain show; surely they are disquieted in vain; he heapeth up riches and knoweth not who shall gather them.” In the prospect of such hours of gloom, the Psalmist prays: “Cast me not off in the time of old age; forsake me not when my strength faileth.” When the youthful wish for long life, they seek they know not what. Age is solitary; the tritest figure is the most apt: the tree whose branches have been lopped off, tiU it stands a naked trunk. Such is the tax paid for longevity. Decline does not commonly arrive without a succession of warnings, enigmatically depicted in that strange oriental passage which closes the Ecclesiastes.

Limbs grow stiff; the repast is toilsome; articulate utterance is hindered; sight and hearing become obtuse; pains visit and revisit the frame, and at length make settlement. Caution waxes inordinate, and turns into timorous apprehension. Seasons of hilarity decrease, and the wintry nights are long. It requires something from another sphere than that of nature, to prevent despondency, suspicion and discontent. If the diseases which portend departure act on the physical functions, the sadness of a worldly Old Age is deplorable. If poverty or neglect or domestic disappointment be added to the loss of all life’s pleasures and excitements, old age is a great and almost insupportable malady. Yet observation, in all varieties of condition, shows that the love of life abides in perfect vigour. We might expect that very weariness of living would make the old man prompt to go; but the ligament becomes only more tenacious. The wisest instructor we ever had used to say, and to say in old age, that natural decay produced no increase of readiness to depart. An eminent writer on Pastoral Theology reports, as of his own observation, that more than a hundred young persons, whose deathbeds he visited, passed away in peace; that the middle aged clung more closely to life; but that the most unwilhng of all were the aged.* Even the crime of self-murder is perpetrated oftener by the young than the old. At no period does man hang on worldly

* “Erfahrungen am Kranken und Sterbebette;” von E. Kuendig. Basle, 1856.

things with a more tenacious clutch, than when they are all about to be rent away together. This very much levels the condition of rich and poor in old age. The wealthy sinner has that which he can no longer enjoy; yet never did he so yearningly gape for more. The ship is in the very harbour; yet the voyager is amassing fresh stores. It is a madness which constitutes part of the punishment of an irrehgious life. The thirst of gain is insatiable. Comedy and satire in all languages have painted the same picture. Young enthusiasts think that when they shall be old and rich, they will diffuse blessedness on hundreds around them; and it is true this would tend to make the close of life delightful. But when they have reached the point, alas, the heart has grown old and is withered. Scores may have died who might have been claimants for aid; poor kinsfolk may have been long ago warned off by the chilly barrier; the doleful habitation may have its valves all opening inwards; and yet there is not enough. Just such a spot, in Gentile mythology, was the hell of Tantalus. Such old age is trouble and sorrow. So Solomon concludes; “There is one alone, and there is not a second; yea, he hath neither child nor brother: yet there is no end of all his labour: neither is his eye satisfied with riches; neither saith he. For whom do I labour, and bereave my soul of good? This also is vanity, yea, it is a sore travail.” Ecc. iv. 8.

Even the true Christian, when his case is viewed without the solace of which we shall presently speak, sometimes passes through great trials in the latter portion of his life. To some the Valley of the Shadow of Death is long and dreary. Diversities of corporeal disability, family vexation, and mental agitation or depression, assault and weaken the resolution which has withstood repeated shocks. And I freely own, that if we could take no higher view of life than that which is admitted by the sceptical world, we should abandon the worn-out creature to his despair. He might, in lucid intervals of a partial belief, cry out to his Maker, “Whv hast thou made all men in vain?” What can be more melancholy, than a soul about to migrate to an unknown state? There is something so contrary to nature in the forced attempts at gayety which sometimes disgrace aged people of the world, that society is prompt to manifest its disgust. The gravitation of native temperament prevails over all such affectations, mockeries and disguises. The soHtary hour is honest, and it is dark. Outward mementoes are multiphed. Ah, in how many funeral processions must the survivor walk with sad decorum, himself a living sermon to all around! “Because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets.” No longer delighted to live, yet afraid to die, the worldly man who has survived his contemporaries, grows sullenly silent and keeps his own secret. Por to whom shall he go with that complaint, which only serves to break the spell of his cherished delusion and reveal him to himself? Dear as his gold is, he would almost barter it all for a draught of that fountain of youth which Spanish adventure sought in tropical America. The poor disquieted sufferer is faint, and discovers, that so far as nature reaches, old age is a time of weakness and trouble.

II. Christian confidence and hope in God give freshness, strength and joy, even in the period of Old Age. “They that wait on Jehovah,” or in modern English, they that wait for him, who evince their trust in his goodness and power by patiently awaiting the fulfilment of his promises, they, though no longer young (mark the contrast with v. 30), “shall renew their strength; they shall mount up on wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, and they shall walk and not faint.” The same thought is in the thanksgiving of the one hundred and third Psalm, V. 5: “Bless Jehovah, O my soul, who satisfieth thy mouth with good things, so that thy youth is renewed like the eagle’s.” From both we may conclusively gather that Divine grace has influences to bestow which can counteract and often annul the debihtating tenden- y cies of Old Age. We are not authorized, it is true, to teach that any degree of religious ajffection can turn back the shadow on the dial-plate, restore its auburn beauty to the gray head, or neutralize the physical causes of distress; though even here, such is the power of spirit over matter, that history shows marvels of an almost youthful gladness in blessed Christian old age. But we may and can assert, that he whose habits have been formed in a perpetual waiting upon God, receives a hallowed unction of grace, which, so to speak, makes him young again, or, more properly, keeps him from waxing old within. In the most rapid survey, we have considered some of the causes which make this season of life formidable. All ages have observed them; all philosophies have sought to destroy or lessen their force. The most accomplished of all Roman authors has left nothing more finished than his celebrated tract on Old Age. Short of the meridian beam of revelation and its reflections, nothing ever showed more nobly; yet the ray of its consolations is but a beautiful moonlight. In vain is the venerable Cato introduced to teach us secrets which Cato never knew. In this gem-hke treatise Cicero refers the troubles of age to four classes. Old Age, so he tells us, is feared because (1) it withdraws from the affairs of life; because (2) it brings infirmity of body; because (3) it abridges or ends our pleasures; and (4) because it leads to death. Already, in treating of these several heads, much is said truly, ably, and to a certain extent satisfactorily, on the first and third topics; but on the last, there is nothing but melancholy conjecture. Even in regard to the other heads, of business, health and pleasure, the suggestions are infinitely below those known by the humblest Christian rustic. Por what did this great and eloquent Roman know of the oil which grace pours into the sinking and almost expiring lamp?

It is not to be denied, when we come with candour to the investigation, that as a general truth, Old Age withdraws men from the employments of life, and seals up the active business years. In the great majority of instances, however, this retreat for labour is voluntarily sought long before the access of grave infirmity. In deed, in prosperous communities, many retire too early, under a chimerical hope of enjoying an elegant repose, for which they have made no provision by mental culttire and discipline of moral habits. There is, it is true, another sort of recession from productive labours, which we occasionally observe in old men, and which arises wholly from an unchastened selfishness. Let any one grow wealthy without the warming and expanding influences of benevolence, and he will more and more lose his interest in all that is going on in the world. Even wars and revolutions touch him only in their financial aspects, and the daily journal is to him not so much a courier of news, as a barometer of loss and gain. Without religion, the circle becomes more contracted. Friends have departed, by scores if not by hundreds. What cares he for mighty movements in behalf of humanity and holiness around him? What cares he for posterity, the country or the world, so that he can exalt his own gate, or die worth some round sum which floats before him as his heaven? In the same degree he wraps himself in his mantle, which is daily shrinking to his own poor dimensions. This is misery indeed. Take away the blessed sun, and every thing becomes wintry, frozen, all but dead: take away more blessed love, and the heart is dumb, cheerless, insulated, meanly poor, so that the Latins named such a one MISER. Let us leave him, shivering in his cave, overhung with icicles, and come out into the evening sunshine to consider the aged beHever. He is like Mnason, “an old disciple.” He still learns. The Greek story tells us that when Solon lay dying, and overheard some conversation on philosophy in his apartment, he raised his head and said, “Let me share in your conversation, for though I am dying I would still be learning.” Ten thousand times has this been more reasonably exemplified in dying Christians, who consider the whole of this life as but the lowest form of the school into which they have been entered. And in regard to activity, while modes of service must vary with the bodily condition, we are bold to maintain that innumerable Christians now living are, in advanced life, impressing the whole engine of human affairs with as momentous a touch as at any previous stage of existence. If there is Wisdom, the proper jewel of age, and divine grace in its manifold actings, there need be no lack of influence. They still lift up the eagle pinion, and soar in such greatness as belongs to their nature. But the point to which we would ask more marked attention is this, that the aged believer, so far from being selfishly dead to what is going on in the world, is more vigilant and more in sympathy with all, than even in his days of youth. Blessed be God, we have seen this again and again. The man who waits on God, the man of faith and hope, the man of melting benevolence, looks through the loopholes of retreat upon a world whose vast and often terrific revolutions interest him chiefly as included in a cycle of providential arrangements calculated to develop and exhibit the glory of grace. His heart beats responsive to these. The news of Christ’s kingdom is as dear to him as when he was vehemently active in the field. He looks down the ages by the lamp of prophecy, and beholds events which will take place when he shall have been long in paradise. This connects him with the cause of Christ on earth, and redeems him from that miserable dungeonlike seclusion of soul

which wastes away the aged worldhng. So far is it from being true that these portraitures are figments of religious imagination, that we have been led to the choice of the subject by knowledge and recollection of this very paradox in actual example, to wit, extreme old age made light, strong and happy, by community of interest in the progressive triumphs of philanthropy and missions.

When, according to the Talmudic fable, the eagle soars toward the sun, he renews the plumage of his former days. As the serene disciple withdraws himself from any personal agency in the entangling plans of life, he studies more profoundly what his Master is wealing into the web of history. No longer young, he has a heart which gushes in sympathy with the young. He cheers them on. He places the weapons in their hands. He takes from the wall his sword, shield, and helmet, and rejoices that God still has younger soldiers in the field. He lives his life over again in their achievements, and pictures to himself more signal victories after he shall have gone. Like the wounded hero Wolfe, he could even die more happy if the shout of victoryshould arouse his failing perception, Par from being shut up in morose neglectful selfishness, he glories that God’s cause still lives and must prevail.

2. But, then, you retort, there is a sad infirmity, inseparable from Old Age. Piety, however exalted, will not remove this. Of all diseases this is proverbially the most incurable. Brethren, we might take the high ground, that godliness hath the promise of the life that now is; that temperance and other virtues prolong life and avert disease; that the righteous shall “see good days,” and that religion is the best of all medicines. But fearing lest we should be charged with exaggeration by the inexperienced, we will pitch our cause on a lower plane, and rest content with declaring that Christian confidence and hope confer a strength which is perfectly compatible with all this bodily weakness, decay and pain. Christianity, my hearers, is a system of indemnities. It does not insure us exemption from all losses, but it guarantees that these shall be more than made up to us. True, the grand indemnification is at the recompense of the resurrection. But prelibations of glory are poured into the earthly vessels of grace. The quickening charm is not natural, but supernatural. Mark, in the twenty-eighth verse, how the eternal increate fount of good is pointed out; and learn how the fulness of God, through a Mediator, becomes the available supply of man: “Hast thou not known? hast thou not heard, that the everlasting God, Jehovah, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? There is no searching of his understanding. He giveth power to the faint r Here is human infirmity brought into connection with Omnipotence. Here is the solution of Paul’s enigma, “When I am weak, then am I strong.” Here is Christ’s cordial to the aged, “My strength is made perfect in weakness.” But let us return to our prophet. He represents even blooming adolescence as desponding, while the feeble are made powerftd by faith. “Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall; but they that wait on the Lord shall renew their strength.”

In the return from Babylon the oldest were saddest; for they remembered the glory of the first house. Nehemiah, therefore, had peculiar reference to them, when he said to the weeping assembly, “Neither be ye sorry; for the joy of the Lord is your strength.” Holy joy is a springhead of renewed youthfulness. The effects of grief and age are not unlike. How often have we seen a friend go into the house of mourning, young, and come out old? Such was David’s experience, Ps. xxxii. 3: “My bones waxed old, through my moaning all the day long; for day and night thy hand was heavy upon me: my moisture is turned into the drought of summer.” The cedars and palms of the sanctuary, planted in the house of the Lord, “shall still bring forth fruit in old age, they shall be fat and flourishing,” Ps. xcii. Make a soul thoroughly glad, and you make it young. The effusion of divine joys has virtue to annul outward disabihties. For observe the perfect analogy of another passage concerning strength. Is. xxxv: “Strengthen ye the weak hands, and confirm the feeble knees: say to them that are of a fearful heart. Be strong, fear not!” “Then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb shall sing.” Such is grace, superseding nature, conciHating contraries, making the feeble mighty and giving youth to the aged. And 0 how greatly would our experience and observation of the gift be increased, if with higher faith and expectation we were waiting upon God!

3. The antechamber of the Eternal abode is cold and appalling to nature. This makes Old Age unwelcome to the unprepared. This causes the wretched shifts by which they avert the thought of doom. So successful is the delusion, that the man of seventy plans for to-morrow as if he were not already in many senses dead. No man is so old, says Cicero, but that he thinks he may live another day. And so from day to day, as by stepping stones in the turbid stream, they totter on, till the sudden fall plunges them into eternity.

The fear of death, which on the young sometimes works salutary reflection, often becomes to the aged a motive for abstracting the thoughts from the hateful subject; and so they think of something else, and are damned. I dare not undertake to say, what may be the reflections of the old worldHng, when he lies down for the last struggle, and finds that Eternity is dawning on his soul, and yet that he has not made the least provision for meeting his God. But I know, for I have often seen, how strong in faith and hope may be the old age of the true Christian. After all, it is celestial HOPE which sheds the dew of youth on his silver locks. His posture is that of waiting, as watchers expect the dawn. “More than they that watch for the morning.” Fresh blood seems to course through those outworn arteries, as Hope waves the hand of indication towards perpetual spring and everlasting youth. Not in the mere elysian or Mohammedan sense, though we deny the attributes and enjoyments of that bodily complement of the soul which is to be raised in incorruption, in glory, in power, a spiritual body. But the fresh breath of knowledge, of reason, of truth, therefore of beauty, of love, of universal holiness, is wafted from those gardens to the ancient believer, as he worships, * leaning on the top of his staff,’ and sojourns a little in the land of Beulah. We have sometimes seen the clearness and vigour of former years come back. Call not that man old, who is full of joys and hallelujahs, and who is eager to drop the clog, shuffle off the mortal coil, and soar like a bird set free from the snare of the fowler. Call him old who is inveterate in sin; who never prays; who dares not think of death; who is without God and without hope, and on whose hoaryhead no blessing ever descends. The Simeon who has Christ in his arms, has in him a well of water springing; and so the true fountain of youth. All believing and sublime exercises of Christian experience have in them something as fresh as childhood. Once when I was supporting a very aged believer from the house of God, he turned to me and said: “I never felt younger, and I believe that promise is fulfilled in me. He * satisfieth thy mouth with good things, so that thy youth is renewed like the eagle’s.’” This persuasion, that true religion brings the soul into fellowship mth all that is free, hopeful and advancing in earth, and all that is bright and perfect in heaven, led the most distinguished of late German theologians, Schleiermacher, to say, in the close of a long life: “The true Christian is always young.”

The racy old EngHsh of John Bunyan best sets forth this stage of pilgrimage: “Here they heard continually the singing of birds, and saw every day the flowers appear in the earth, and heard the voice of the turtle in the land. In this country the sun shineth night and day. Here they were within sight of the city they were going to: also they met some of the inhabitants thereof; for in this land the shining ones commonly walked, because it was upon the borders of heaven. In this land also the contract between the Bride and the Bridegroom was renewed, yea, here, * as the bridegroom rejoiceth over the bride, so doth their God rejoice over them.” My beloved brethren, we must be submissive to God’s will, even if such an evening of life be not vouchsafed to us. Yet I will maintain, that it is of the nature of Christianity to produce such joys. The exceptions are not from grace, but from* disturbing causes in our partially unsanctified hearts.’ Waiting on God is directly promotive of fresh and heavenly strength. The long continued practice and i rooted habit of waiting upon God, in confidence and I expectation, are the best preparative for a serene decline ’ and a happy end.

If the sentiment of the world may be safely judged from its reflection in the mirror of the fictitious literature, which is seized with most avidity and reproduced in the greatest number of languages, then unquestionably the opinion is, that there is no happiness in evangelical piety; and an Old Age of religion is one of sourness, vindictiveness, and misanthropic woe. Let the picture of a Christian matron be painted by the matchless pencil of one, whose misfortune it must have been never to have beheld the original, and with whom devotion and hypocrisy are the same, and the Hneaments are such as these: “Great need had the rigid woman of her mystical religion, veiled in gloom and darkness, with hghtnings of cursing, vengeance, and destruction, flashing through the sable clouds.” I quote from the ignorant and mahgnant travesty of Christian Old Age, which mars the most widely current story of the hour. And I quote it, because it will meet response in hundreds of thousands, who need the grace of Christ to avert these very storm-clouds of decUning day. Let a holier literature prevail in the refined world, a literature which shall honour holy wedlock, family religion, and the iChurch of Christ, and we shall behold other portraitures of the wife or the widow upon whom evangelical truth has shed its dews of eventide.

You listen, my hearer, with the interest of one who expects to journey thitherward. But you will perhaps never reach that stage of the way. A small proportion attain to hoary hairs. Yet even for you, the topic is not devoid of interest. That which is good for Old Age is good for other conditions of sadness, which resemble it; for illness, disease, pain, solitude, reproach, poverty, or depression. When you shall have learnt to wait on 1 the Lord, you shall tread all these under your feet, as f ready to fly heavenward.

That which prepares for Old Age, prepares for the termination of life at any age. It is decreed that every human life shall close; and most close early. To go suddenly and unprepared into that shadow is fearful. Does not wisdom commend this familiar, trustful, filial waiting upon God? The judicious and eloquent Sau-EiN wished that he might in every sermon make some allusion to Death, because he had remarked how imiversally this consideration was affecting to the mind. The Pather of our spirits meant that it should be thus. Endure the contemplation long enough to chill carnal ardours and dispel the juvenile mirage. Even in prosperity wait on the Lord.

It would be treachery in me to conceal altogether the woe and peril of a Christless Old Age. Horrid anomaly! So dead to this world’s pleasures, so near to heaven or hell, and yet unconcerned. Tottering on his staff, the impenitent veteran in the camp of Satan blunders on, already half gone, and stupidly improvident as to the only means of dying well. O, poor old man! let me in affection and pity cry to you, seize on that only medicine which gives everlasting youth! Attach yourself, by acquiescing in his free redemption, to that Saviour whom we are authorized to offer to the worst and oldest.

‘Suijpo