Aunt Jane removed her glasses and folded her withered hands over the sacred pages. "You know, child," she said, "the Bible's the word of God. I ain't questionin' that. But it looks like to me there's some o' the words of man in it, too. Now this psalm I've jest read is the very one to read at a watch-meetin' on New-year's eve because it's all about time and life and the passin' o' the years, but there's some o' the verses I'd like to leave out. There's that tenth one about 'the days of our years' and the strength of our years. I reckon we all feel like sayin' such things when we git tired and it looks like we haven't done the work we set out to do, but that's the sort o' feelin' to keep to ourselves. It don't do any good to tell such feelin's. And when a man can say that the Lord has been his dwellin' place in all generations, he oughtn't to turn right around and say that the strength of his years is jest labor and sorrow. The trouble with some folks is that they're always lookin' back and countin' the years wherein they have seen evil, but they don't ricollect that the Lord's promise is to make us glad accordin' to the evil years. Trouble has got to come to us, child, but whenever it comes we ought to know there's happiness comin' to make up for it jest like this psalm says, 'Make us glad according to the days wherein thou hast afflicted us, and the years wherein we have seen evil.' I've lived pretty near eighty years, and I've had my share o' trouble, but I'm far from sayin' that the strength of my years is nothin' but labor and sorrow. I never had a sorrow that I didn't know there was a happiness comin' to make up for it. I've spent my life 'as a tale that is told,' and I'm nearly to the end of it, but I'd be right glad, child, if I could go back to the beginnin' and have it told all over again." It is easy to pronounce a benediction on life when life is in its morning; but with the darkness of the long night closing around us the words that rise most often to human lips are the words of the cynic king who, from "the dazzling height of a throne," surveyed the magnificent ruin of his years and said, "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity." God once looked at a seething chaos which he called his world and pronounced it good. Only a divinity could do this. And only the divinity in man enables one to look back on the chaos of sorrow, ecstasy, hope, despair, labor, failure, sin, and suffering which we call life and say, "It is all good; I would live it again if I might."