Aging & Wisdom Quote by George A. Smith

A sermon sentence dressed up as a benediction, this line quietly sorts its audience before it consoles them. George A. Smith aims it at the young who have managed to stay un-jaded: the ones who have not yet had their ideals sanded down by disappointment, doubt, or the blunt economics of adult life. The imperative is gentle but unmistakable: keep looking up. Not just toward heaven, but toward the kind of horizon religion promises - order, meaning, eventual justice.

The phrasing carries a protective nostalgia. Youth is framed as a moral asset ("preserved their faith"), as if belief were a delicate thing you can keep intact with the right habits and the right community. That word "preserved" smuggles in a warning: faith decays. Hope leaks. Time, experience, and worldly knowledge are cast as corrosives, and the faithful response is to orient upward anyway.

Context matters. Smith was a 19th-century American clergyman in an era when Protestant exhortation competed with modernity's early shocks: expanding frontiers, sectarian churn, scientific confidence, political upheaval. "Keep looking up" functions as pastoral triage. It offers the young a posture - literally a direction of the body - that stands in for a whole spiritual discipline: resist cynicism, resist despair, resist the temptation to interpret suffering as evidence against providence.

The subtext is almost parental: I can't guarantee life will be kind, but I can urge you to keep your gaze where kindness is supposed to come from. In that way, the line is less naive than it sounds; it's a survival strategy packaged as faith.