Also Franks was beginning to feel or to fancy his
strength and elasticity not quite what they had been. The first
suspicion of the approach of old age and the beginning of that weakness
whose end is sure, may well be a startling one. The man has begun to be
a nobody in the world's race--is henceforth himself but the course of
the race between age and death--a race in which the victor is known ere
the start. Life with its self-discipline withdraws itself thenceforth
more to the inside, and goes on with greater vigor. The man has now to
trust and yield constantly. He is coming to know the fact that he was
never his own strength, had never the smallest power in himself at his
strongest. But he is learning also that he is as safe as ever in the
time when he gloried in his might--yea, as safe as then he imagined
himself on his false foundation. He lays hold of the true strength,
makes it his by laying hold of it. He trusts in the unchangeable thing
at the root of all his strength, which gave it all the truth it had--a
truth far deeper than he knew, a reality unfathomable, though not of the
nature he then fancied. Strength has ever to be made perfect in
weakness, and old age is one of the weaknesses in which it is perfected.
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