Untitled article

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · January 7, 1868

RESPECT THE AGED.—Many an old person has the pain—not bodily, but sharper still—of feeling himself in the way. Some one wants his place. His very chair in the chimney corner is grudged him. He is a burden to son or daughter. The very arm that props him is taken away from some productive labor. As he sits at the table, his own guests are too idle or too unkind to make him a sharer in their mirth. They grudge the trouble of that raised voice which alone could make him one of them; and when he speaks it is only to be put aside as ignorant or despised, as old-fashioned and obsolete. Oh, little do younger persons know their power of giving pain or pleasure! It is a pain for any man, still in the world, to be made to feel that he is no longer of it, to be driven in upon his own little world of conscious isolation and buried enjoyment. But this is his condition! and if any fretfulness or querulousness of temper has aggravated it—if others love him not because he is not amiable—shall we pity that condition the less—shall we upbraid it with that fault which is itself the worst part of it?