Old age comes on almost imperceptibly though the young, perhaps will hardly credit it. Men with furrows in their brow, and gray hairs on their head, often find it difficult to remember that they are old; to believe it, to realize the approach of their end; how near they are to the grave.
Death seems to flee before us like the horizon which we ever see, and never reach. The river that springs like an arrow from its rocky cradle, to bound from crag to crag, to rush brawling through the glen, and, like thoughtless youth, to waste its strength in mere noise, and froth and foam, flows on smoothly, slowly, almost imperceptibly as it approaches its grave in the bosom of the sea.
And so it is often with man. The nearer we draw to our end, through a natural callousness or otherwise, the less sensible we grow to the evils and approach of age. And when a man has not left his peace with God to seek in old age, his greatest work to a time when he is least fit to do it, it is a most blessed thing that old age does not make our hearts old, or benumb our feelings—that gray hairs are on us, and we know it not—GUTHRIE.
