DEAN INGE ON LEAVING WORK

Greymouth Evening Star, 14 September 1934, Page 9

DEAN INGE ON LEAVING WORK

VALUE OF OLD AGE. LONDON, July 30. Dean Inge spoke of old age at St. Paul’s last night when he preached what may be his last Evensong sermon in the Cathedral before his retirement from the Deanery. His farewell sermon will be preached in September. In lessons and hymns at the service there was also the note of parting after work done. Speaking of retirement, Dean Inge said: “This is, perhaps, a world where everyone is wanted, but no one is wanted very much. “Our real reluctance to give up our task is more because we wish to have tho credit of it than because we fear the work will be undone when we are gone. Few men are vain enough to think themselves indispensable. “Ono who has been an actor all his life doesn’t quite like the idea of becoming a mere spectator, and so he very often hangs -on at his work too long.” Tho Dean referred in his sermon to the relations between children and their elders. “There is no surer way of losing rule of the younger generation,” he said; “than for elderly people to make a ridiculous pretence that they belong to it.” “DEATH DOES NOT' COUNT.” Continuing, he said: “We don’t pride bodily beauty so much as tho Greeks, but many have wished not. to survive their good looks, and many men have dreaded the humiliation of decreptitude and wished to die in the vigour of life. “And yet we have a feeling that a life cut short before old age is incomplete. Length of days has always been a boon some men have prayed for, though Solomon was sensible enough to pray for wisdom instead. “Wo’ ought, I am sure, neither to fear death nor to wish for it. We ought

to feel that death simply does not count. All that mattters.is that a life should be well lived up, till the time of its close. If we are not the creatures of to-day, but immortal spirits, what can it matter if we spend a few years, more or less in this state of our probation? “I like the brave words of Sir Thomas Overbury in the seventeenth century, that man feels the advance of age rather by the strengthening of his soul than by the weakness of his body. “Childhood is not merely a preparation for manhood, and old age is not merely a preparation for death. The rich colours of autumn are as admirable and rightly fashioned as the delicate greens of spring.”