Old age depends largely upon the attitude of men toward the whole of life. Old age is not a joke nor a bore nor a trial nor a calamity, though it may be any one of these as all of life may be. But what needs to be stressed is that old age has no content in itself apart from the whole of life. Old age may be as nothing else a foretaste of the kingdom of heaven where faith and hope may meet and love crown all. But little can come to old age that was not in and throughout life. Alas for the old age of the self-centered and self-serving! If life have built walls that shut out, these cannot be razed by age, which will forever have made itself captive. The crown of old age is a term that trips lightly from our tongues. Are we not in danger of forgetting that there must be something to crown? For in old age inheres no magic to redeem and transfigures all that has gone before. Old age purges the precious metal of life’s substance of its debasing dross, but the precious substance must be there to be purged. Age, like happiness, is neither to be sought nor evaded. It is a by-product of life rather than life’s end. Not the aim nor goal of life, but the way of life must it be. In the matter of reverencing old age, we rest historically upon the firmest Jewish foundation. For the Jew as no other man before or after him taught the world how to magnify childhood and to glorify old age,—to rise up before the hoary head and honor the face of the old man. And this revering solicitude for the aged is still one of the marks of Jewish life. Jewish teaching has urged and Jewish practice has confirmed the truth that blessing rests upon that home in which the aged have found shelter. Indeed, one is almost disposed to hold that there is a possibility of overdoing reverence for old age as old age, of becoming indiscriminating in the honor which one metes out to the hoary head. If the people of Israel have erred in any part with respect to old age, they have revered the aged head too much irrespective of the head and the man. I would not if I could break with that fine tradition, but, sometimes, it were well to ask whether old age is to be respected as a virtue in itself, whether length of days should be regarded as a merit apart from what has gone before. Old age is judged compassionately on the principle that nothing but the good should be spoken touching the dead or the nearly dead.