It would seem that the very fact that man has succeeded in living and conserving tolerable health till advanced years gives a feeling that he has, on the whole, succeeded despite errors and lapses, and there seems to be at least a tacit agreement on the part of all that it is idle to regret what it is too late to help. Old age does not, therefore, seem to be a time of repentance for youthful follies and if this exists at all, it is more than compensated for by a complacency that things have not been worse than they were, and even the possibilities of the latter bring no disquietude. _What temptations do you feel, old or new?_ More of my respondents failed to answer this question than any other and most answers were brief. It is very interesting and significant to note that resistances to anything like confessionalism increase with age. If the old have long walked in ways that society condemns, their secrecy about it has been too long and habitual to be readily broken. This is one reason why psychoanalysis totally fails with the old, so that most analysts refuse to take patients over forty. The German jurist, Friedrich, said that everyone was a potential murderer, because at some moment in his life he had been angry enough to kill and probably would have done so if every circumstance had favored. So the candid and conscientious man who looks back upon a long life realizes that he has done or nearly done, at least in heart, about every crime and yielded and felt promptings to about every vice. Probably everyone, too, had actually done things that if known would expose him to obloquy. Thus the old almost never go to the confessional. Moreover, there is a benign but deep instinct in us to forget things we have done that would disgrace us and perhaps especially those things at which our own moral sense and self-respect most revolt, where qualms of conscience would be so painful that we refuse to face them. And this is connected with the fact that in those churches that stress a radical change of heart, with deep conviction of sin, conversions of the old are very rare. Martial[192] says of the fortunate old Antonius viewing the years behind: Back on their flight he looks and feels no dread To think that Lethe’s waters flow so near. There is no day of all the train that gives A pang; no moment that he would forget. A good man’s span is doubled; twice he lives Who, viewing his past life, enjoys it yet. All, of course, want to do just this, so that “the good men do” may live “after them,” while “the bad is interred with their bones.”