Aging & Wisdom Quote by Charles Spurgeon

Spurgeon’s warning lands like pastoral counsel, but it carries a steely realism about how human beings actually change. “It is not well” sounds mild, almost grandmotherly, yet it smuggles in a hard claim: late-life reinvention is rarely just difficult; it can be spiritually and socially destabilizing. In a Victorian religious world that prized steady character and public consistency, “great changes” weren’t framed as “growth” so much as volatility - a sign you’d either neglected your formation earlier or were now vulnerable to fashion, fear, or manipulation.

The line works because it flatters and admonishes at the same time. It respects the dignity of age (“old age” as a settled season) while cautioning against the romantic modern idea that identity is endlessly editable. Spurgeon is also defending something institutional: tradition, routine, the accumulated habits that keep faith from becoming a mood. For a clergyman addressing a congregation, the subtext is practical governance. Elder members are pillars; if the pillars start moving, the building shakes.

There’s likely a private theological edge too. Spurgeon preached conversion and renewal, but he also believed sanctification is largely the slow work of years. The sentence quietly pressures the young to do their transforming early, when conscience is pliable and responsibility hasn’t calcified. Read that way, it’s less a ban on change than a critique of procrastinated character: wait too long, and “great changes” stop being courageous and start being costly.