It is a saying of Southey’s, “that, live as long as you may, the first
twenty years are the longest half of your life. They appear so while
they are passing; they seem to have been so when we look back to them;
and they take up more room in our memory than all the years that succeed
them.”
But in how strong a light has this been placed by the American teacher,
Jacob Abbott, whose writings have obtained so wide a circulation in
England. “Life,” he says, “if you understand by it the season of
preparation for eternity, is more than half gone; life, so far as it
presents opportunities and facilities for penitence and pardon,—so far
as it bears on the formation of character, and is to be considered as a
period of probation,—is unquestionably more than half gone to those who
are between fifteen and twenty. In a vast number of cases it is more
than half gone even _in duration_; and if we consider the thousand
influences which crowd around the years of childhood and youth, winning
us to religion, and making a surrender of ourselves to Jehovah easy and
pleasant,—and, on the other hand, look forward beyond the years of
maturity, and see these influences losing all their power, and the heart
becoming harder and harder under the deadening effects of continuance in
sin,—we shall not doubt a moment that the years of immaturity make a far
more important part of our time of probation than all those that
follow.”
That pious man, who, while he lived, was the Honourable Charles How, and
might properly now be called the honoured, says, that “twenty years
might be deducted for education from the threescore and ten, which are
the allotted sum of human life; this portion,” he adds, “is a time of
discipline and restraint, and young people are never easy till they are
got over it.”
There is indeed during those years much of restraint, of weariness, of
hope, and of impatience; all which feelings lengthen the apparent
duration of time. Sufferings are not included here; but with a large
portion of the human race, in all Christian countries (to our shame be
it spoken), it makes a large item in the account; there is no other
stage of life in which so much gratuitous suffering is endured,—so much
that might have been spared,—so much that is a mere wanton, wicked
addition to the sum of human misery, arising solely and directly from
want of feeling in others, their obduracy, their caprice, their
stupidity, their malignity, their cupidity, and their cruelty.[30]
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Footnote 30:
_The Doctor._
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