LIFE’S PERPETUAL RENEWAL
‘Who satisfieth thy mouth with good things; so that thy youth is renewed like the eagle’s.’
Psalms 103:5
How may we recover in manhood, but in a wiser way, what was noble in our youth—recover our manifold interests, our poetic feeling towards the history of man and nature, our ideal of the goodness, truth, and love of man?
I. The restoration of manifold interests.—Youth teaches us diversity, the first entrance into middle age concentration; in later life we ought to combine both, to recover the interests of the one and to retain the power of the other. I think one can do it best by the means of two great Christian ideas. One is that, as God has called us to perfection, we are bound to ennoble our being from end to end, leaving no faculty untrained. The other is that as Christ lived for man’s cause, so should we. The first will force you to seek for manifold interests in order to make every branch of your nature grow; the second will lift you out of the monotonous and limited region of self into the infinite world of ideas. An infinite tenderness and grace belongs to every work whose highest aim is the aim of Christ—the good of man. Life then becomes delightful, even of passionate interest; and the whole of being unfolds like a rose—full of colour, scent, and beauty.
II. Restoration of poetic feeling.—In the old dreamland we can never live again, but we may live in an ideal and yet a true world; we may restore the poetry of youth to our life in its relation both to man and nature. (1) As to the first, there is no idea which will so rapidly guide us into a larger and more imaginative view of the history of man as the great Christian thought, which we owe to Christ, that all the race is contained in God; that all are bound together into unity in Him; that as all are children of one Father, so all are brothers, existing in and for the good of one another. (2) Again, in our relation to nature, we can get back what we have lost. There are different paths to this recovery, but none lead to it more directly and rapidly than the true conception of God. Once we have realised the thought of one Divine will as the centre of the universe, we can no longer abide in the realm of unconnected facts. We hear no longer isolated notes, but the great symphony of nature—two or three themes infinitely varied, and the themes themselves so subtly connected in idea that all together they build up a palace of lovely and perfect harmony. This is the restoration in a truer form of the ideal majesty and the poetic feeling of our youth.
Illustration
‘ “So that thy youth is renewed like the eagle,” as the Revised Version has it, avoids making the Psalmist responsible for the fable of the eagle renewing its youth. The believer renews his youth in feeding daily on the bread of life. He finds the secret here of perpetual youth. “There is an allusion, no doubt to the yearly moulting of the feathers of the eagle and other birds, the eagle being selected as the liveliest image of strength and vigour.” Every loss of youthful taste and pleasure, it has been said, is a partial death. The Christian has no such losses. He goes from strength to strength.’