Getting on in Life

Someone whose hair was growing iron-grey said, “I am getting on in life.”  His friend, who knew him very well, had his doubts.  He mistook getting on in years for getting on in life.  He was morally and spiritually just about where he had been thirty years before.  Nobody gets on in life except those that achieve spiritually.  When boyhood’s bad temper persists into manhood, when one is irritable, disobliging, selfish, haughty, proud, self-sufficient, immoral, godless, one should not talk about getting on in life, even if one is rich as Croesus.  To get on in life is to rise in moral stature.  It is to have a soul big enough to love and admire without envy, to be content with treasures of the mind, to set character first of all.  The man who is “rich in faith” gets on.  The others drift down the years, or accumulate great possessions, but in the essential things, the things of eternity, they are waterlogged and stationary.

There is a sentence in Plato to this effect:  “The unexamined life is unlivable for a real man.”  Every true man must think his life out.  Every true organization ought to examine its achievement and its purpose.