Education Quote by Robert Hall

A sermon’s worth of skepticism hides inside this calm, almost homespun line. Hall, a dissenting clergyman preaching in an age drunk on “improvement,” is warning his listeners about a very specific mistake: confusing time served with insight earned. “Only in the length of days” sounds like a proverb, but it lands as a rebuke. If wisdom is treated as a simple byproduct of aging, then the young are disqualified in advance and the old are flattered by default. That’s not piety; it’s intellectual laziness dressed as respectability.

The phrasing matters. “We are to seek” casts the problem as communal and moral, not merely personal. Hall isn’t diagnosing a quirky habit; he’s correcting a social reflex. The line takes aim at a culture that grants authority by seniority, letting experience substitute for judgment and tradition substitute for thought. In a pulpit context, it also pushes back against a comfortable religious posture: the idea that time in the pew, time repeating doctrines, time accumulating “days,” will automatically mature faith into understanding.

Hall’s subtext is sharper than the surface. Wisdom isn’t a pension plan; it’s a discipline. Days can harden people as easily as they can refine them. By implying that we “seek” wisdom in the wrong place, he’s inviting a more unsettling question: what if long life, without reflection, produces not sages but simply older versions of our earlier selves?