When old age has the grace of exalting duty and subordinating privilege, it ceases to be the period of mute resignation. From one point of view, it is the age of resignation, for one wittingly resigns in part what death is wholly to take away, but, be it made clear, resignation is not inaction, renunciation is not willlessly surrendering torpor. These things imply will, action, choice, not merely an awaiting of the end without murmur or complaint. For old age waits not but wills; old age surrenders not but whilst life is renders return for life. While different types of laws seem to obtain for youth, maturity and old age, these yet are one and one spirit seems to pervade and dominate all. Let youth hold high its aim and pursue high aims through holy means. Let maturity serve and achieve and above all achieve only that it may serve with unimpaired admiration and undimmed ideals. And let old age be nobly wise and unafraid and unselfish to the end! Much, if not everything, of the content of old age depends on the things for which one cares. If one care for the things that cannot survive youth or middle age, whose value is inevitably lessened with the flight of years, then old age must become barren and empty. Whether your old age is to be void and meaningless depends almost wholly not upon what you have and care for at seventy or eighty, but what it was you sought to have at twenty, what you cared for at thirty, what you cherished at forty. Certain things may be harmless, even admirable in themselves, and yet are destined to be woefully disappointing if they are suffered to become the pursuits of a lifetime and men give themselves to things for which they cannot care when the years have multiplied. Myopia may interfere with one’s zest for looking upon motion pictures, limbs may become too rheumatic for dancing, tragic though this may sound, the hazard of games of chance may lose its fascination, even money-making, the accumulation of things, may pall or become impossible. But certain things there are that can never grow stale nor wearying nor seem unprofitable. Upon these let men fix their vision and their aim, the pleasures of the mind, the tasks of the spirit, the possibilities of serving. It is almost life’s greatest danger that life will be lived with care for things interest in which cannot survive youth and middle age. What if a man were so to train himself physically that he could run and do nothing else, so that after the period of running had passed, he could not walk! Would not such modus vivendi seem unwise and sadly blundering?