An Extravagant Waste
"Such an one as Paul the aged." -- Philemon 9
A few years ago a certain university professor made the startling statement that after forty a man ought to be chloroformed.
I am glad Paul was not chloroformed at forty. It was after he was far past that age that he wrote his immortal epistles and did his best work. It would have meant a great loss to the world if Alexander Maclaren had been chloroformed even at eighty-five. It was after he had passed eighty-five that he wrote his Expositions of Holy Scripture, consisting of a long series of volumes, and generally recognized as one of the best contributions to Biblical literature.
Dr. William Alexander Newmann Dorland has recently studied the lives of four hundred famous men of history and found that it was beyond fifty years of age that a large majority of these men accomplished their greatest work.
The list of four hundred men studied by Dr. Dorland included such men as Talleyrand, Lincoln, Washington, Webster, Shakespeare, Byron, Erasmus, Sterne, Rabelais, Cervantes, Newton, Beecher, Agassiz, Buffon, Blackstone, Balzac, Hawthorne, Trollope, Verne, Cooper, Thackeray, Leibnitz, Barret, Booth, Irving, Priestley, Morse, Wordsworth, Southey, Keats, Rubens, Raphael, Michelangelo, Murillo, Cavour, Whitman, Longfellow, Milton, Tennyson, Whittier, Huss, Wyclif, Knox, Ruskin, Wolsey, Columbus, Mozart, Greeley, Cromwell, and John Bunyan.
What if these men had been chloroformed at forty? Who can estimate the loss the world would have suffered?
In view of Dr. Dorland’s findings, what a lamentable folly is the present-day tendency to force men into retirement because they have passed middle age. The result is to deprive society of their service just when experience has equipped them for their best work. It means an extravagant waste.
