The temptation of middle age is to yield to the spirit of disenchantment, though verily that is oft-times called disenchantment which means nothing more than the absence of enchantments. The temptation of middle age is not so much to give up ideals as to realize that one is without them. Then men mistake their poor plans and plottings, their puny purposes for ideals and wonder why they have lost that which in truth they never had. Men rarely lose ideals. Poor, imperfect substitutes for ideals are found out and find out their owners,—if so they may be named. Men are not to fear losing ideals in middle age. They are to fear not having them in youth so that they cannot hold them throughout life. Middle age depends upon youth, and its disillusionments are due chiefly to the absence of illusions in the time of youth. In middle and in old age men suddenly discover that they cannot reap what in youth they have failed to sow. That middle age finds the ideals of youth unsatisfying and even unengrossing, indicts only youth and not itself, shows that the map of life, if drawn at all and as drawn in youth, was not ample and generous enough to have proved sufficing for a lifetime. Assuming that middle age is less joyous than youth, it enjoys one supreme satisfaction, or rather reaps one supreme compensation, that of the consciousness of two powers, two of life’s sovereign powers, the power to achieve and the power to serve. If youth initiates, middle age most achieves and best serves,—most achieves because it is a time of fullness of intellectual strength and firmness of moral will; best serves because the stains of self have been or ought to have been burnt out and there is left the capacity of selfless enlistment under banners unrelated to personal gain or private advantage. The middle age that men find bare and unsatisfying is in truth that to them who have not mastered the two arts of life, achieving and serving. Certain mistakes are not uncommon in respect of the interpretation of middle age, for example, that it is not the period of high initiative. Because things are not initiated with dash and flare, it is assumed that middle age undertakes nothing. On the contrary, it is then and perhaps only then that things are begun and achieved for their own sake, that things are really undertaken in the consciousness of strength and with a capacity for achievement. Moreover, while little can be carried into and beyond middle age that is not initiated in youth, the soul of man has not in the middle period forfeited or abandoned the power of self-correction and self-redemption. It may not be easy, neither is it impossible.