Gold Nugget 364 - The Old Man

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      To every one, if he should live long enough, old age will come, with impaired powers of judgment, sensibility, and activity; but whether it will be honorable, useful, and happy depends on the course previously pursued and the character possessed.  “Clearness and quickness of intellect are gone; all taste for the pleasures and delights of sense is gone; ambition is dead; capacity of change is departed.  What is left?

      The old man lives in the past and in the future.  The early child-love for the father and mother who hung over his cradle eighty years ago remains fresh.  He cannot ‘hear any more the voice of singing men and singing women;’ but he can hear, stealing through almost a century, the old tones, thin and ghostlike, of the dear ones whom he first learnt to love.  The furthest past is fresh and vivid, and in memory of it is half his life.  Also he looks forward familiarly and calmly to the very near end, and thinks much of death.  That thought keeps house with him now, and is nearer to him than the world of living men is.  Thus one-half of his life is memory, and the other half is hope; and all his hopes are now reduced to one – the hope to die, and then to be laid down and go to sleep again beside his father and mother.  And so he returns to his city, and passes out of our sight” (Maclaren).

 

The Pulpit Commentary, II Samuel p. 485, II Samuel 19:31-40, (B. Dale)

 

Gold Nugget 364

The Old Man

 

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