Maturity, or the middle period of life, is in a sense the largest part of life, and is not to be viewed merely as the period after youth and before old age. It is relative only as all time is relative, but it is absolute, too. In truth, it is the time of that self-dependence which comes with the consciousness of power in maturity. It is the very body and substance of life and least relative,—for youth is its foreshadowing and old age the shadow which it casts behind. Middle age is not a link between youth and old age, but that period of life to which youth is an approach,—from which old age is an exit. Comparing life to a bridge, youth and old age might be likened to the piers which must be builded, but the linking together of the piers, the stretching of the cables over which the larger part of life’s pilgrimage must be made is the task of life’s middle period. Life is so constituted that it were almost within the limits of reasonableness to urge that life need not pass out of the middle stage into old age. Loath though one be to enter upon maturity, it need never be left behind in return for age if it be entered upon in the spirit of preparedness. Middle age is hard and bitter if youth have been misspent, if youth have not been the stage of conscious preparation for life. Certain rules have been laid down for the governance of youth and the question may be asked whether these are pertinent to the needs and tasks of middle age,—namely the law that one must have an ideal by which to live, and that one must not merely live by it but up to it. As for the rules which are to be binding upon the middle period of life, who shall venture to prescribe them, save that certain things are obviously true,—that middle age shall continue that which youth initiates, and that there shall be no sharp frontier dividing youth from that which comes after. For middle age is not so much a part of life as it is life, and life absolute. Middle age is but a part of the same life-long journey which in its early stages is youth, which culminates in age. And yet in a sense a different type of rules and ordinances is applicable to every one of the three great periods of life. For life is not a journey, even and unvarying, over a wide plain. Life may best be likened to the ascent of a mountain and in turn the descent from its summit, and the laws that govern life must be variously modified in order to meet the needs of the different periods along the journey.