HH, Sir Godfrey Gregg D.Div

Courage Increases as Life Advances

It is one of the happy things, too, in human life, that courage grows easier as life advances. If we are living well and doing our work faithfully, we grow more equal to our problem with the years. A child begins by fearing almost everything because it begins by knowing almost nothing. Every shadow may be a horrid specter and every darkroom is full of ghosts. But the years pass and we enter many a shadow, and the abhorred specters are not there, and so our childish terrors pass away.

I knew an officer who in the thick of battle was reckoned among the bravest of the brave, and yet that man would blanch like any girl if he found himself in the presence of covid-19. And I know scores of ministers within our city who would never think twice of visiting a covid-19 patient, and yet I am certain they would be ghastly spectacles within the fighting lines of Afghanistan. The fact is that far more than we imagine, courage is a result of habit. The soldier who trembled in his first battle will enter his fifteenth without a thought.

And so God is kind to us as life advances, and the fiery ardour’s of our youth decay for with ripening knowledge some things become harder, but it does not become harder to be brave. The dash is gone. The youthful fire is gone. We are not as heroic as at twenty-one. The old man cannot storm the heights of life with the reckless enthusiasm of the regiment. But he has seen such goodness of the Lord to him and had such sustainment in trial and difficulty, that he can lift up his heart and go forward gently where youth would despair in tragedy.

TO BE CONTINUED TOMORROW …