ADVANCING YEARS.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 19036, 3 April 1930, Page 4

ADVANCING YEARS.

You can never ultimately coerce Nature. Nature lie? Nature never does lie; it is only man that lies, and in proportion as man lies does he depart from Nature. See whether you can get Nature to lie: put paint upon your cheek to make yourself look young; you cannot put smoothness on your brow to correspond. Nature is a continual protest against lying. What are those wrinkles coming upon seme of you? The retreat of physical reality before the life. What is a wrinkle? The mark of the ribbed sea sand that tells me where yesterday’s tide of life was, but where it is no longer to-day. What are those grey hairs of mine, coming so fast? The retreat of juvenility before, if I be a holy man* a coming spiritualism, and if I be an unholy man, a decaying sensualism. You are grey-headed now; what does if teach? That sense is an ebbing tide with you, and that physical reality and lustfulness are ebbing with it. A hoary head if in ways of righteousness is a glory, because then, as colour is gone, and sensualism fading out, spiritualism, of which beauty of form is the emblem, has taken its place; hence we learn in the old head and the old face rather to look for beauty of form than of colouring, for colour is the sign of sensualism; colour is the sign of the body, form the sign of the soul George Dawson.