To repeat the experience, go to a strange town and take up your abode. Everybody seems in his proper place, there are no breaks, we miss nothing, the social structure is complete. In a quarter of a century go back to the place again; ruins everywhere, nearly all the old landmarks gone, and a new generation upon the stage. But to the newcomer nothing of this is visible; he finds everything established and in order as we first found it. It is so in life. Our children are the newcomers who do not and cannot go behind the visible scene. We are always wondering who are going to take the place of the great poets, the great preachers, the great statesmen and orators who are passing away. We see the new men, but they are not the worthy successors of these. The great ones are all old or dead. The new ones we know not; they cannot be to us what the others were; they cannot be the star actors in the drama in which we have played a part, and therefore we fancy they are of little account. Are there any genuine old men any more? Why, the old men, the real ones, are all dead long ago; we knew them in our youth; they were always old, old from the foundations of the world. These old men of to-day are mere imitations; we can remember when they were not old,--it is all put on. The grandfathers and the grandmothers whom we knew--think of any present-day grandparents being anything more than mere counterfeits of them! Hence, also, the new generation always go astray according to the old, and run after strange gods. “And also all that generation were gathered unto their fathers; and there arose another generation after them, which knew not the Lord, nor yet the works which He had done for Israel.” How ready we are to believe in the past as against the present; to believe that wonders happened then that do not happen now! Miracles happened then, but not now. The Divine One came upon earth then, but he comes no more! Our whole religion is of the past. How hard to believe in a present revelation, or to believe in the advantages and opportunities of the present hour! From the standpoint of each of us the sunrise and the sunset seem like universal facts; it must be evening or morning throughout the world, we think, instead of just here on our meridian. In the same way we are prone to look upon youth and age as commensurate with human existence; the world was young when we were young, and it grows old as we grow old; youth and age we think are not subjective experiences, but objective realities.