Aging & Wisdom Quote by Tryon Edwards

Edwards pulls a neat theological sleight of hand: he demotes the calendar from judge to mere clerk. In the 19th-century Protestant moral universe he inhabited, a person’s real age is less biology than posture of the soul. “Temperament and health” sounds practical, even proto-scientific, but it’s also a character argument smuggled in as common sense. Your “age” becomes a readable index of inner governance: cheer, resilience, discipline, and the capacity to stay spiritually awake.

The barb is in the line break between sympathy and indictment. “Some men are born old” isn’t just pity for the prematurely worn down; it’s a rebuke of those who arrive in life already rigid, anxious, convinced the world’s pleasures are suspect. Edwards frames that as temperamental failure, not fate. Then he flips it: “some never grow so” praises a kind of evergreen elasticity, but with a Protestant edge. Youth here isn’t hedonism; it’s liveliness without moral drift, energy without childishness. It’s the adult who can still be surprised, still be useful.

The subtext is social as much as spiritual. In an era obsessed with self-improvement and “manly” self-command, this line reassures the vigorous that they aren’t frivolous for feeling young, and warns the prematurely solemn that their seriousness may be a vice dressed up as virtue. Edwards offers a moral alternative to fatalism: if age is temperament, then it’s also, uncomfortably, partly your responsibility.