Being over seventy is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and the dying as on a battlefield.
And as regards Adam and Eve we must maintain that before the fall they were virgins in Paradise: but after they sinned, and were cast out of Paradise, they were immediately married.
The charges we bring against others often come home to ourselves; we inveigh against faults which are as much ours as theirs; and so our eloquence ends by telling against ourselves.
For all riches come from iniquity, and unless one were to lose another could not gain. Hence the common adage seems to me to be very true: The rich man is unjust or the heir of an unjust one.
So valuable to heaven is the dignity of the human soul that every member of the human race has a guardian angel from the moment the person begins to be.
