impressed or engraved upon it. Hence Cicero’s remark, “Boys pick up countless things with rapidity.” In the same way it is only in the years of boyhood, when the muscles are still capable of being trained, that the hands and the other members can be trained to produce skilled work. If a man is to become a good writer, painter, tailor, smith, cabinet-maker, or musician, he must apply himself to the art from his early youth, when the imagination is active and the fingers flexible: otherwise he will never produce anything. If piety is to take root in any man’s heart, it must be engrafted while he is still young; if we wish any one to be virtuous, we must train him in early youth; if we wish him to make great progress in the pursuit of wisdom, we must direct his faculties towards it in infancy, when desire burns, when thought is swift, and when memory is tenacious. “An old man who has still to learn his lessons is a shameful and ridiculous object; training and preparation are for the young, action for the old” (Seneca, Epist. 36).
6. In order that man may be fashioned to humanity, God has granted him the years of youth, which are unsuitable for everything but education. While the horse, the ox, the elephant, and other beasts, mere animated masses, come to maturity in a few years, man alone scarcely does so in twenty or thirty. Now, if any imagine that this arises from chance or from some accidental cause or other, he surely betrays his folly. To all other things, forsooth, God has meted out their periods, while in the case of man alone, the lord of all, He allows them to be fixed by chance! Or are we to suppose that nature finds it easier to complete the formation of man by slow processes? Nature, who with no trouble can produce vaster bodies in a few months. We can only suppose, therefore, that the Creator, of deliberate intent, interposed the delay of youth, in order that our period of training might be longer; and ordained that for some time we should take no part in the action of life, that, for the rest of our lives, and for eternity, we might be the more fitted to do so.
7. In man, that alone is lasting which has been imbibed
