The Iola register. [volume] (Iola, Allen County, Kansas) 1875-1902, 1893-03-17

| JnlrIleS- Inc IdcI Is, bLldI ny Ihc way
you decide the present decade of your
history, you decide all the following de.
cades.
Next l accost the forties. Yours is
the decade of discovery. lido not mean
the discovery of the outside, but the
discovery of yourself No man knows
himself until he is 40. He over-esti-
mates himself By that time ne has
learned what he can do. or what be
cannot do He thought he had COM
mercial genius enough to become a mil
lionaire, but now he is satisfied to make
comfortable living. He thought he
had rhetorical power that would bring
him into the United States senate; now
he is content if he can successfully
argue common case before a petit
jury. He thought he had medical skill
that would make him a Mott or a
Crosse or e Willard Parker or Sims;
now he finds his sphere is that of a
family physician, prescribing for the
ordinary ailments that affllct our race
He was sailing on in fog and could not
take reckoning, but now it clears up
real latitude and longitude. He has
been climbing, but now he has got to
the top of the hill and he takes long
breath. He is halfway through the
journey at last, and he is in
a position to look backwardor forward.
He has more good sense than he ever
had. He knows human nature, for he
has been cheated often enough to see
the bad side of it, and he has met so
many gracious and kindly and splen-
did souls he also knows the good side
of it Now, calm yourself. Thank God
for the past and deliberately set your
compass for another voyage. You have
chased enough thiStledown. You have
blown enough soap bubbles You have
seen the unsatisfying nature of all
earthly things. Open a new chapt r
with God and the world. This decade
of the forties ought to eclipse all its
predecessors in worship, in youthful
ness and in happiness. Forty is
great word in the Bible. Gods ancient
people were forty years in the wilder
ness David and solomon and Jehoash
reigned forty years. When Joseph Wis
tied his brethren he was 40 years old.
Oh, this mountain top of the forties!
You have now the character you will
probably have for all time and all eter-
nifty. God, by his grace. sometimes
changes a man after the forties, but
after that a man never changes him
self
u r. In
How queer it looks when, in writing
your age, you make the first of the two
figures s." This is the decade which
shows what the other decades have
been. If young man has sown wild
oats, and he has lived to this time, he
reaps the harvest of it in the fifties, or
if by necessity he was compelled to
overtoil in honest directions he is called
to settle up with exacting nature some
time during the fifties. Many have it
so hard in early life that they are octo-
Cenarians at 80. Sciaticas and rheuma-
tisms and neuralgias and vertigos
and insomnias have their play
ground in the fifties Oh, We
who are in the fifties think of it! \
half century of blessing to be thankful
for, and half century subtracted from
an existence which, in the most marked
case of longevity, hardly ever reaches
whole century. BY this time you
ought to be eminent for piety. You
have been in so many battles you
ought to be a good soldier. You have
made so many voyages you ought to be
a good sailor. So long protected and
you ought to have soul full
every fifty years was by Gods command
a year of jubilee. The people did not
work that year. If property had, by
gone out of ones posses
sion, on the fiftieth year it came back
to him Ifhe had fooled it away it was
returned to him without farthing 10
pay. If a man had been enslaved he
was, in that year, emancipated. A
trumpet was sounded loud and clear
and long, and it was the trumpet
of jubilee. What time it was, that
fftieth year! And if under
the old dispensation it was
such a glad time, under our new and
more glorious dispensation let all who
have come to the fifties hear the trum-
pet of jubilee that / now blow. That
was the allusion made by Mr.. Toplady,
the great hymnologist, when he wrote:
Blow ye the trumpet, blow
The gladly solemn sound;
Let all the nations know,
To earth's remotest bound,
The year Of jubilee is come:
Return, ye ransomed sinners, home.
We who have sold for nought
Your heritage above,
Shall have il back unbought,
The gift of Jesus love.
The year of jubilee has come.
Return, ye ransomed sinners, home.
My sermon next accostS the sixties
The beginning of that decade is more
startling than any other. In his
journey the man rides
rather smoothly over the figures ''2''
and ''3'' and 50 and s." but
the figure ''G'' gives him big jolt
Sixty Now your great danger is the
to fold up your faculties
and quit You will feel tendency to
reminisce. If you do not look out you
will begin almost everything with the
words. when l was a boy" But you
ought to make the sixties more memoir
able for God and the truth than the
ffties or the forties or the thirties
You ought to do more during the next
ten years than you did in any thirty
years of your life, because of all the
you have had You have
enough mistakes in life to
make you wise above your juniors.
Now, under the accumulated light of |