Age should make a precious contribution, even the central faith of life.
Youth, eager, responsive to all noble ambitions and touched by all noble dissatisfactions with what is, makes its plan for what should be on a strictly logical basis.

His rejected Evil is wholly evil; his chosen Good without a flaw.

Children are all Calvinists; and youth, for the most part, separates its ideas of good and bad as the sheep and goats within its mind.

Well that it is so.

The law of growth in life is so far from logical, so operative by inconsistent fluctuations, that it is of the greatest social use for each fresh generation of reformers to hew to the line and express that intolerance of compromise which helps the struggling moral sense to clarify the issues of each new day.
In middle life, if the individual worker for better things is not merely a prophesier but has become an actual agent for the realization of his ideal in practical achievement, he suffers many a disillusion, not in respect to his ideal, but in respect to the ease of working it into the body politic or into the compelling purpose of the social mind.