Middle Life

"Life's Stages: Their Duties and Opportunities." By James Stark; Minister of Belmont Congregational Church. Aberdeen: 1889.

(1.) MIDDLE LIFE

(1a.) Is it not a remarkable circumstance that poets and philosophers generally strike a pensive note when they make middle life their theme. One without a moment’s reflection is prepared to admit that old age has aspects suggestive of sadness, but it is not so evident that man in his prime should be liable to give sober tinge to his thought. But listen to the conversation of two men above forty years of age, who meet for the first time since they were playmates in the same village, and you will not fail to notice that while the lighter tones are heard as they recount the adventures of early days, yet the strain of their conversation is quiet and sober, as they say:- “We both have run o’er half the space; Listed for mortals’ earthly race; We both have crossed life’s fervid line; And other stars before us shine.”

(1b.) One cause for the pensiveness of middle age is the discovery of mortality as a fact in the life, and an actual element in the personal experience. “The grey hairs here and there,” and other unmistakable signs, make one feel what he formerly only believed, that every one in this world is under a sentence of death, with no chance of reprieve. How much there is in our creed that is inoperative, practically dead, til we come up to it, and attain to the contact of experience. It is indeed foolish to measure things by our sensations, concluding that what we do not see and feel in our own person has no relation to us, instead of using reason and imagination to reinforce and make vivid the universal testimony that it is appointed unto men once to die. But then we are all fools, more or less,-befooled by our own fancies.

(1c.) The life that stretches before most young persons is to them as if it were an eternity. For the purpose of impression, death is not always within their horizon of contemplated experiences. The fact that their progenitors in Eden did not obtain renewed access to the tree of life is not realized, and they can scarcely persuade themselves that as citizens of the earth they are not immortals. Their vigour, freshness, and elasticity of physical frame, their buoyancy of spirit and bounding hopefulness, put death amongst those shadowy beliefs which, of course, must be accepted, but which do not belong to the category of experimental truths and working convictions. What parent is there who does not know that death may enter his fold any day and rob him of one of his lambs? but when the little one is in high fever, and the physician looks with a grave and concerned expression, the knowledge comes home.

(1d.) So middle life makes us feel what we formerly knew. Its deeper lines, dimmer vision, and stiffer joints, turn mortality, which was one of those objects of which we knew, into one that we know. Farther on in life there is less of this pensiveness to the healthily constituted mind. If we are Christians we recover from the shock. The grey hair causes more painful surprise than the hoary head, just as the sere and yellow leaf makes one think more of departed summer than December’s stormy blasts and bare fields. The beneficent tendency in nature of gradual adaptation to environment, enables each one of us to accommodate himself to life’s developments as they come. Victor Hugo said that the saddest part of life was between forty and fifty, as it was the old age of youth. After fifty began the youth of old age. Certainly, as the Christian believer nears the borderland where the light is to break and the shadows flee away, some of the brightness of the land which lies at the end of his pilgrimage ought to be reflected in his face.

(1e.) Another cause of pensiveness in middle life is not only the death that is before us but the death that is behind us. Every one who has been forty or fifty years in the world has lost much, and that enforced detachment from objects we loved and valued is death in its worst form. To a man of affectionate and generous disposition, the rupture of the ties of life, the premature removal now and again of companions with whom he began life, and the almost total disappearance of a generation in advance which he venerated, and upon some of whom he leaned for counsel and encouragement since he was a child, make him feel that the bitterness of death has already come and gone. Those who have natures that are sensitive and responsive, that vibrate to all that is about them, to whom associations and memories are more than outside things, cannot but be affected by the changes of which they have been witness and sharers. Burroughs says: “Of certain game birds it is thought that at times they have the power of withholding their scent, no hint or particle of themselves goes out upon the air. I think there are persons whose spiritual pores are always sealed up, and I presume they have the best of it. Their hearts do not radiate into the void; they do not yearn and sympathise without return; they do not leave themselves by the wayside as the sheep leaves her wool upon the brambles and thorns.”

(1f.) Another cause of pensiveness when middle age is in thoughtful mood is the narrowed range of possibility and hope which comes with it, as compared with the Utopian visions and expectations of youth. How true to human experience is that which Melancthon says of himself. When he began to preach the gospel, he thought he had nothing to do but announce himself and his object, and the world of unbelief would fall before him like the walls of Jericho under the blast of the rams’ horns. But he, to use his own language, soon found that “old Adam” was too much for young Melancthon. A man has to be some time in this world before he can measure himself and his capabilities aright. There is a certain amount of illusiveness in life’s early prospect. All is seen through the transfiguring haze of young and ardent enthusiasm. The youth who is high-spirited and imaginative, looks at things through the medium which he himself supplies; he walks upon enchanted ground, where difficulties disappear as by the wave of a magic wand; he is eager to rush into the arena that by one fell blow he may destroy all enemies of righteousness and progress. The millennium is always nearer to one at twenty than at forty.

  "We trusted then, aspired, believed; 

That earth could be re-made to-morrow.”

(1g.) Now, middle life is a period of disenchantment. We get our experience, which does not exactly agree with our expectation. We awake from dreams to sober facts, to the prosaic realities of life.

(2.)  MIDDLE AGE, THEN, HAS TO BE ON ITS GUARD AGAINST CYNICAL SCEPTICISM AND INDIFFERENCE.

(2a.) One of the besetting sins of men who have had experience to correct the extravagant fancies and high-pitched expectations of youth, is cynical indifference. When the discovery is made that things are not to be as their fond imagination represented they would be, a reaction sometimes sets in, and they are embittered, callous. Their zeal, which had some of the character of a volcanic eruption, rather than the heat of a steady fire, is exhausted, and now they are so many extinct volcanoes, hard and cold. Maturity in such a case brings misanthrope. The world before now has seen men who were wildly revolutionary in their youth becoming fossilized traditionalists when the meridian of life was reached.

(2b.) How is that to be avoided? by calling to the remembrance the fact that God’s ways are not as our ways, nor His thoughts as our thoughts, and by reposing in Him the trust we have been forced by inexorable logic of facts, to withdraw from ourselves. We have to gauge aright our place and function in the system of things. We have an inordinate estimate of our own importance. We expect that the work of millenniums is to be compressed within the brief space of our life. We forget that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day, and that we of the present day are but an insignificant part of a countless procession of co-workers.

(2c.) Middle life should not make us skeptical, but sober. We awake then from our feverish dreams to God’s facts. Instead of supposing that we can carry the Kingdom with a bound, we learn to put more reliance on persevering prayerful effort. Faith may be as strong though not so impatient. Zeal may be effective, though it do not blaze and shoot forth sparks as it once did. The electric is not the only kind of force in existence. God does His best work on the earth with the quiet sunshine rather than the pealing thunderstorm. Noon has not the picturesque interest of the morning or evening, but it is then when nature’s activities are busiest. Midsummer has not the richness of song of earlier days, nor the tender grace of autumn, but it is then when the corn ripens and the principal work of the year is done.

(2d.) You middle-aged man who have spied the land, do not bring back an evil report. Do not discourage the young by affirming that what is before them is no land of promise, but a place of difficulty and disappointment, to be dreaded and shunned. Be like Caleb, who saw the children of Anak and the fenced cities as well as the craven-hearted spies who accompanied him, but who also saw God and heard His word. Have less faith in yourselves and more in God. Hold to the belief that the realities in store for mankind transcend by far the fair functions which the human mind coins for itself.

“Faith blighted once is past retrieving; Experience is a dumb dead thing; The victory’s in believing.”

(3.)  MIDDLE LIFE HAS TO BE ON ITS GUARD AGAINST AN UNDUE DEPRECIATION OF THE GENERATION BEHIND IT.

(3a.) Young men are seized with an irresistible desire to make themselves of account in the world, to give effect to the manhood that is in them. This is in accordance with the divine order of things. The earth does not belong to any one generation of men. Progress is maintained by each link in succession doing its best to bring forward the next.

(3b.) Those who by reason of years, and the labours and honours connected with them, have established themselves, should feel that it is part of their duty and privilege to give a hospitable and generous welcome to new arrivals. As the young faces look timidly and yet longingly upon the stage, where you have won a position for yourself, and where they would like to use their prerogative and prove their power as men, bid them come forward. Do not frown them away. They may be opinionative, self-assertive, pugnacious. So probably were you when you were of their age. The controversy between the elder and younger generations is perennial. Young life thinks of the future rather than the past. It is not willing to take the yoke of by-gone centuries. It is inclined to ignore the labours of former generations, and build from the foundation. It is yours to come in as a mediator, and show how far the future may have its due, without the past being discounted; how legitimate independence and progress can be reconciled with reverence for antiquity. All the generations –the young, middle-aged, and old– need one another. Each is helpful to the other. They make a beautiful unity that must not be broken or marred. To lose the society of the young is to middle age a most serious deprivation. Schiller is not more poetical than truthful in describing the loss:-

“Yet I feel what I have lost in him; The bloom is vanished from my life; For O! he stood beside me like my youth; Transformed to me the real to a dream; Clothing the palpable and the familiar; With golden exhalations of the dawn. Whatever fortunes wait my future toils, The beautiful is vanished and returns not.’

(4.) MIDDLE AGE HAS TO BE ON ITS GUARD AGAINST UNDUE SELF-DEPRECIATION.

(4a.) A not uncommon temptation besetting middle age is to under-rate the possibilities which lie before it. We give up too soon. So far as aspiration and eagerness for work are concerned, many die before their time. They go out to meet the shades of evening when they should wait till they come. They think of retirement before Providence grants release. They sever themselves from public life and duty, when there should be no severance, in a world that stands so much in need of experienced guides and trained workers, but such as the sick-bed or the grave enforces.

(4b.) We identify vigour and efficiency with youth, forgetting that there are various kinds of vigour, and that the qualities which are of greatest service to the world are precisely those which are at their best when the body begins to show signs of tear and wear. Sagacity, breath of view, calmness and clearness of judgment, sympathy with men, the mastery of general principles, and even ordinary power of understanding are more conspicuous in the man of fifty than in that same man at twenty, He cannot acquire knowledge so readily, nor take in fresh impressions, nor use his memory with the same advantage, but for insight, cogency of reasoning, and all that comes under the term wisdom, he may be a growing man after middle life is past.

“Now flower and perfect fruit; Together dress the tree, 

High midsummer has come, midsummer mute; Of song, but rich to scent and sight.”

(4c.) Experience givens a man a more distinct impression and a firmer grasp of truth. At first you give what you get from other. You take truth on trust. You are an echo rather than a voice. The young man has not had time to learn, at first hand, to absorb and convert into vital force that which is to his mind and character what the blood is to him body–the wisdom of life. When the youth writes or speaks it is more or less by a purely intellectual process, what is written or said being chiefly due to memory or that kind of mental appropriation, in which the whole man cannot be said to be present. But the middle-aged man who has been living up to his opportunity has experimental assimilation to give weight and authority to his utterance. He is not a mere medium of transmission. He is an original fount. He can testify of things which he has seen and heard. He has not only the full mind, the rich store, but he has the power which springs from the fact that he has personally intermeddled with that of which he speaks.

(4d.) That accounts for the circumstances that some of the best intellectual work in the world has been done by middle-aged men. Sir Walter Scott’s novels were written after he was forty years of age. That period would appear to be the coming of age of great novelists. Thackeray wrote “Vanity Fair” when he was over forty. Michael Angelo did some of his best work when he was approaching sixty.

(4e.) Besides, character in middle life has had time to prove and show itself, and that imparts added momentum to the personality. A man when young is an untried force, an experiment, and time is needed before confidence can grow and be established. Consequently, what he says has not the weight that it will have after those who hear have had the opportunity of testing the witness as well as the testimony.

(4f.) Middle-aged men! the world and God Himself expect you to take the most responsible part of the best work that is to be done. Many are learning, others from old age are retiring from the world’s service; you have to bear the heat and burden of the day. You have gathered your materials, you have acquired skill in the use of your tools, -work while it is day. Rouse yourselves from dreams of ease. Work has to be done, and who is better fitted than you to do it?

(5.) MIDDLE LIFE HAS SPECIALLY TO BE ON ITS GUARD AGAINST EARTHLY-MINDEDNESS.

(5a.) Many men who began life well show signs of moral and spiritual decline when middle life is reached. The crust of custom begins to encase their spirits. Not content with dutiful attention to the things of the earth that is balanced by some kind of moral or religious work outside the business that brings bread, they become wholly absorbed in the selfish getting of gain. Breaking away from the influences of a Christian home and the promise of early days, they leave the golden age of life behind them, and enter upon the iron age of toil for its own sake, or for the money it brings. What object in life is more hard, callous, unlovely, than a middle-aged man who cares for nothing but what contributes to the increase of his hoard? Such worldliness is treason to a man’s own soul; it is the extinction of the light which heaven has put within him; it is moral insanity.

(5b.) If the temperament be a different order, the degeneracy in middle life takes the form of self-indulgence. How many who in early days were full of moral ardour, temperate, scrupulous, -relax very considerably as they and the world become more intimate. Instead of their course being upwards they slip down to low levels and become of the earth earthly.

(5c.) Middle-aged men need warning and admonition quite as much as young men. Forty marks a crisis in life as much as twenty. If we do not habitually walk with God and maintain our conversation with heaven we are almost sure to become “terrestrialized.” When we allow life to slip from God and conscience, it come under the iron grasp of habit, and habit which cannot justify itself before reason and Scripture. History is full of examples of person such as Mahomet and Solomon, who lost in the middle life the purity and simplicity of early days.“’Tis the most difficult of tasks to keep; Heights which the soul is competent to gain."

(5d.) You who are young choose now some kind of work for which you can have no motive power except what the love of God and man supplies. Keep up your acquaintance with God, and be loyal to His cause upon the earth. Faithful continuance in that course will carry you safely through the perils of middle life, when you reach it. Neglect prayer, Christian work, and the privilege of giving, and in all probability you will come under the hard thralldom of worldliness, which is the besetting vice of middle age. To every one between the middle and the end let it be said:-

“Finish thy work; The time is short; The sun is in the west; The night is coming down; Till then; Think not of rest.”

(6.) MIDDLE LIFE POEMS

(6a.) “There is no man suddenly either exceedingly good or exceedingly evil, but grows, either as he holds himself up in virtue, or lets himself slide in viciousness.” –Sir Philip Sidney

(6b.) “’Tis not growing like a tree; In bulk doth make man better be; Or standing like an oak three hundred years; To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere.” Ben Jonson.

(6c.) “Dipping buckets into empty wells; And growing old in drawing nothing out.”

     

(6d.)“Beautiful young enthusiasm! keep it to the end, and be more and more and more correct in fixing on the right object of it. It’s a terrible thing to be wrong in that – the source of all miseries and confusions whatever.” –Carlyle.

(6e.) “The fancy of the lower mind – That waxing life must needs leave all its best behind.”