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ALAS for the man who has lived meanly! his old age is a sad and wintry day, whereunto the spring offers no promise. He sowed the wind: it is the storm he reaps.

Here is an old sensualist. In his youth he threw the reins on the neck of every lust which wars against the soul. In his graver years, his calculation was only for the appetites of the flesh, ambition for sensual delight. Now he is old, his desire has become habit, but the instruments of his appetite are dull, broken, worn out. He recollects the wine and the debauch once rejoiced in; now they have lost their relish; his costly meat turns to gall in him. He remembers nothing but his feasting, and his riot, and his debauch. He has had his skin full of animal gluttony, nothing more. He thinks of the time when the flesh was strong about him. So the Hebrews, whom Moses led out of thraldom, remembered the leeks and the onions and the garlic which they did eat in Egypt freely, and said, "Carry us back to Egypt, that we may serve false gods and be full." He dreams of his old life; some night of sickness, when opium has drugged him to sleep, it comes up once more. His old fellow-sinners have risen from the dead; they prepare the feast; they pour the wine; they sing the filthy ribald song; the lewd woman comes in his dream; - alas! it is only a dream; he wakes with his gout and chagrin. Let us leave him with his bottle and his bloat, his recollection and his gout. Poor old man! his gray hairs not venerable, but stained with drunkenness and lust. So have I seen, in other lands, the snows of winter fall on what was once a mountain that spouted cataracts of fire. Now all is cold, and the volcano's crater is but a bowl of ice, which no mortal summer can melt; and underneath it there are the scoria and the lava which the volcano threw up in its heat-cold, barren, ugly to look on. O young man! young maid! would you be buried alive, to die of rot, in such a grave as that?

Here is an old man who loved nothing but money. Instead of a conscience, heart, and soul, he had only a three-headed greedy worm, which longed for money-copper, silver, gold. In youth, he minted his passion into current coin, courting an estate; in manhood, he was ambitious only for gold; in old age, he has his money, the passion and ambition therefor; the triple greedy worm, three times more covetous than before. As the powers of the body fail, his lust for gold grows fiercer in that decay :

-the interest table is his creed,
His paternoster and his decalogue.

How afraid he is of the assessor! In youth avarice was a passion; in manhood calculation; but now the passion is stronger, the calculation more intense, and there is the habit of covetousness, eighty years old. The accumulated fall of eighty winters gives his covetousness such a momentum as carries him with swiftly accelerated speed down into the bottomless pit of hunkerism. He has no care for right and justice; no love for mankind; none for God. Mammon is his sole divinity, that Godhead a trinity of coin. What an end of what a life! His gray hairs cover only an estate; he is worth nothing.

covetous man who for

Did you ever see the old age of eighty years had gathered gold and nothing more? I have seen more than one such. It is the sin of New England. I spoke of poverty the other day; of want which I saw in the cellars of Broad Street and Burgess Alley, in the attics of the North End Block. There is no want so squalid, no misery of poverty so desperate, as the consciousness of an old miser, in his old age of covetousness. Pass him by.

What a beautiful thing is the old age which crowns a noble life, of rich or poor! How fair are the latter days of many a woman wife, mother, sister, aunt, friend-whom you and I have known! How proud were the last years of Washington; the old age of Franklin! How beautiful in his late autumn is Alexander von Humboldt! The momentum of manliness bears on the venerable man beyond his four-and-eightieth year. There you see the value of time. It takes much to make a great life, as to make a great estate. No amount of genius that God ever gives a man could enable one to achieve at forty what Humboldt has only done at more than eighty. It was so with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Leibnitz, every great man who has awed the world by the action of a mighty intellect, with corresponding culture.

These are men of high talent, station, genius perhaps. But the old age of a Quaker tailor in Philadelphia and New York was not a whit less fair. The philanthropy of Isaac Hopper blessed the land; in his manhood it enriched the world; in his old age it beautified his own life, giving an added glory to his soul.

How many farmers, mechanics, traders, servants, how many mothers, wives, and aunts have you and I known, whose last days were a handsome finish to a handsome life; the Christian ornament on the tall column of time! Their old age was the slow setting of the sun which left

The smile of his departure spread

O'er the warm-colored heaven and ruddy mountain head. Miss Kindly is aunt to everybody, and has been so long that none remember to the contrary. The little children love. her; she helped their grandmothers to bridal ornaments, threescore years ago. Nay, this boy's grandfather found the way to college lay through her pocket. Generations not her own rise up and call her blessed. To this man's father her patient toil gave the first start in life. That great fortune - when it was a seed, she carried it in her hand. That wide river of reputation ran out of the cup her bounty filled. Now she is old, very old. The little children, who cling about her, with open mouth and great round eyes, wonder that anybody should ever be so old; or that Aunt Kindly ever had a mother to kiss her mouth. To them she is coeval with the sun, and like that, an institution of the country. At Christmas they think she is the wife of Saint Nicholas, such an advent is there of blessings from her hand. She has helped lay a Messiah in many a poor man's crib.

Her hands are thin; her voice feeble; her back is bent; she walks with a staff-the best limb of the three. She wears a cap of antique pattern, yet of her own nice make. She has great round spectacles, and holds her book away off the other side of the candle when she reads. For more than sixty years she has been a special providence to the family. How she used to go forth the very charity of God-to soothe and heal and bless! How industrious are her hands! how thoughtful and witty that fertile mind! Her heart has gathered power to love in all the eighty-six years of her toilsome life. When the birth angel came to a related house, she was there to be the mother's mother; ay, mother also to the newborn baby's soul. And when the wings of death flapped in the street and shook a neighbor's door, she smoothed down the pillow for the fainting head; she soothed and cheered the spirit of the waiting man, opening the curtains of heaven that he might look through and see the welcoming face of the dear Infinite mother: nay,

she put the wings of her own strong, experienced piety under him, and sought to bear him up.

Now these things are passed by. No, they are not passed by; they are recollected in the memory of the dear God, and every good deed she has done is treasured in her own heart. The bulb shuts up the summer in its breast which in winter will come out a fragrant hyacinth. Stratum after stratum, her good works are laid up, imperishable, in the geology of her character.

THE CHARACTER OF JESUS.

BY HORACE BUSHNELL.

[HORACE BUSHNELL : An American theologian; born in Litchfield, Conn., April 14, 1802; died at Hartford, Conn., February 17, 1876. He was graduated from Yale in 1827; taught school; studied law; engaged in journalism; and in 1833 became a Congregational clergyman. His liberal views resulted in his trial for heresy, but he was not excommunicated. His works include: "Christian Nature" (1847), "God in Christ" (1849), "Christ in Theology" (1851), "Nature and the Supernatural" (1858), "Sermons for the New Life" (1858), "Character of Jesus" (1861), "Work and Play " (1864), "The Vicarious Sacrifice" (1865), "Moral Uses of Dark Things" (1868), "Woman Suffrage" (1869), and "Forgiveness and Law" (1874). He received the degree of D.D. from Wesleyan in 1842, and from Harvard in 1852; and that of LL.D. from Yale in 1871.]

COME now, all ye that tell us in your wisdom of the mere natural humanity of Jesus, and help us to find how it is that he is only a natural development of the human; select your best and wisest character; take the range, if you will, of all the great philosophers and saints, and choose out one that is most competent; or if, perchance, some one of you may imagine that he is himself about upon a level with Jesus (as we hear that some of you do), let him come forward in this trial and say "Follow me," "Be worthy of me," "I am the light of the world," "Ye are from beneath, I am from above," hold a greater than Solomon is here ;"- take on all these transcendent assumptions, and see how soon your glory will be sifted out of you by the detective gaze, and darkened by the contempt, of mankind! Why not? is not the challenge fair? Do you not tell us that you can say as divine things as he? Is it not in you too, of course, to do what is human? Are you

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not in the front rank of human developments? Do you not rejoice in the power to rectify many mistakes and errors in the words of Jesus? Give us then this one experiment, and see if it does not prove to you a truth that is of some consequence; viz., that you are a man, and that Jesus Christ is more.

But there is also a passive side to the character of Jesus, which is equally peculiar and which likewise demands our attention. I recollect no really great character in history, excepting such as may have been formed under Christianity, that can properly be said to have united the passive virtues, or to have considered them any essential part of a finished character. Socrates comes the nearest to such an impression, and therefore most resembles Christ in the submissiveness of his death. It does not appear, however, that his mind had taken this turn previously to his trial, and the submission he makes to the public sentence is, in fact, a refusal only to escape from the prison surreptitiously; which he does, partly because he thinks it the duty of every good citizen not to break the laws, and partly, if we judge from his manner, because he is detained by a subtle pride; as if it were something unworthy of a grave philosopher, to be stealing away, as a fugitive, from the laws and tribunals of his country. The Stoics, indeed, have it for one of their great principles, that the true wisdom of life consists in a passive power, viz., in being able to bear suffering rightly. But they mean by this, the bearing of suffering so as not to feel it; a steeling of the mind against sensibility, and a raising of the will into such power as to drive back the pangs of life, or shake them off. But this, in fact, contains no allowance of passive virtue at all; on the contrary, it is an attempt so to exalt the active powers, as even to exclude every sort of passion, or passivity. And Stoicism corresponds, in this respect, with the general sentiment of the world's great characters. They are such as like to see things in the heroic vein, to see spirit and courage breasting themselves against wrong, and where the evil cannot be escaped by resistance, dying in a manner of defiIndeed it has been the impression of the world generally, that patience, gentleness, readiness to suffer wrong without resistance, is but another name for weakness.

ance.

But Christ, in opposition to all such impressions, manages to connect these nonresisting and gentle passivities with a character of the severest grandeur and majesty; and what is

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