Keeping Young

“They shall still bring forth fruit in old age.” PSALM xcii. 14.

I wonvDER if Mrs. Humphry Ward is quite right in a word she has used of Mr. Stopford Brooke. It is found in her reminiscences of a very crowded life. She says that Stopford Brooke’s old age was “‘ a triumph in the most difficult of arts.” ‘‘ He was young to the very end, he knew what to give up, and what to keep, and his freshness of feeling never failed.” I am wondering if the word ‘‘ arts’ gives the right interpretation. Mrs. Ward’s words have always spacious meanings. Perhaps it is wrong to question her usage here. But the word “arts” seems to suggest too much effort, too much careful purpose, too much anxious design, to explain something which ought to be very natural. One sometimes hears of people who are “trying to keep young,” and their efforts are frequently not: a little pitiful. They force themselves to go here and there and they constrain themselves into this mood and that mood, and they usually get very weary in their endeavours, and the wrinkles gather about their spirits as they have already gathered about their brows. Their efforts are too mechanical. It is something like a table fountain I once saw in a friend’s dining-room. The waters were leaping and dancing like strong springs in the heather; but, alas! I could hear the click of the machinery. There was too much art and too little nature and life.

I like the scriptural word better than Mrs. Ward’s. ‘“‘ They shall bring forth fruit in their old age.”? That takes us from art to nature, from the machinery into the garden. The beautiful growths are natural and spontaneous. They are the inevitable issues of certain deep and vital relationships. ‘“They that be planted in the house of the Lord shall bring forth fruit in old age.” A certain rootage is to result in certain fruitage. We are to abide in a certain soil and the fruit is sure. ‘He that

12 abideth in Me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit.” And the fruit does not become more meagre as the years increase. That is one of the marvellous surprises of renewing grace; the spiritual fertility is maintained to the end of the days. The Scriptures use the figure of the vine, or the garden, or the field whenever they wish to suggest the secret of a fruitfulness which is uninjured by the wintry rigours of old age. The lovely fruit can be found upon the tree in the far-off years.

But there is even more than this. “His. leaf also shall not wither.” That seems to suggest an antidote to the withering influence of the years. Even the leaf is to keep green. It is not to become sere and yellow. And the leaf is the early thing, the first thing, the thing of the springtime. ‘‘ The tender leaves of hope.’ These are to be upon the tree at seventy as they were at twenty. A man who is rooted deeply in the Lord is to carry an optimistic spirit when he is old. He is to bear the leaves of hope, and expectation, and eager interest and cheerfulness. The young things are to be his when the birthday book tells a different story. At autumn-time his spirit is to be bright with the promise of the spring.

If there is any art at all, it consists in just burying one’s roots in the Lord. If we are rooted and grounded in Him, the increasing years will have no terror. We shall face them with the alertness of children, and we shall greet the unseen with a cheer.