| J.R. MIller | Page 12 |
We need to be always watchful lest we allow our life to deteriorate in its quality as we go on from year to year. This is especially one of the temptations of advancing age. There seems less to live for, less to draw us onward and upward, and inspiration is apt to grow less strong. The best seems behind us, and zest for toil and struggle grows less keen. We yield to weariness, we relax our discipline and self-restraint, we do not mind so much the little slips, the minute neglects, the lowering of tone in feeling, in sentiment, in conduct. We are losing our life’s brightness and beauty, and we know it not. We allow ourselves to become less thoughtful, less obliging, less kindly, less forgetful of self, less charitable toward the mistakes of others, less tolerant of others’ faults and weaknesses. People to whom we have been a comfort in the past begin to note a change in the degree of our geniality and our spirit of helpfulness. We are not interested in human need and trouble as we used to be. Friends apologize for us by saying that we are not well, that we have cares and sufferings of our own, or that we are growing old. But neither illness nor age nor pain should make us less Christlike. St. Paul tells us that though our outward man is decaying, yet our inward man should be renewed day by day. The true life within us should become diviner continually in its beauty, purer, stronger, sweeter, even when the physical life is wasting.
To all men there come, along the years, experiences that are hard to endure. Disappointments come and misfortunes, in one form or another. Business ventures do not always succeed. In some cases there are years of continual and repeated disaster. Ill health saps the energy and strength of some men, leaving them unequal to the struggle for success, and compelling them to drop out of the race. Life is hard for many people, and there are those who do not keep brave and sweet in the struggle. Some lose heart and become soured in experiences of adversity. Nothing is sadder then to see a man give way to disheartenment and depression, and grow misanthropic and gloomy or soured in spirit.
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