Fifth

“ The Fourth Age paceth on, till a man have accomplished two and fortie yeares, and is tearmed Young Manhood.—The Fifth Age, named Mature Manhood, hath fifteene yeares of continuance, and therefore makes his progress so far as six and fifty yeares. ”

“ There are lots of fifth wheels in the world. Some are old and rusty and out of repair, and down in their inmost hubs they long to roll off into the gutter and lie there quiet and undisturbed. These are the old people—silver-haired, self-effacing—who go upstairs to bed early when guests are invited for dinner. ”

“ The critical point is that the Constitution places the right of silence beyond the reach of government. The Fifth Amendment stands between the citizen and his government. When public opinion casts a person into the outer darkness, as happens today when a person is exposed as a Communist, the government brings infamy on the head of the witness when it compels disclosure. ”

“ But I haven't such an excuse. I am not necessary to the happiness of any household. I am what is known as a fifth wheel—a useless piece of paraphernalia carried along as necessary impedimenta on other people's journeys. ”

“ I cannot agree that the Court is right in making the admissibility of the confessions turn on the guilt or innocence of the defendants. The denial of the benefits of the Fifth Amendment on the Court's belief that the defendants are guilty is a high price to pay for a conviction and a new, dangerous inroad on the protections of that Amendment. But if this is to be the standard, then I can see no escape from the conclusion that the admissibility of the confessions should ultimately be determined by a jury-not by the judges of this or any other court. ”

“ The privilege to remain silent was regarded by our ancestors as the inalienable right of a free man. To compel a man to accuse himself was regarded as a cruelty beneath the tolerance of civilized people, and it simply is not true as a matter of law that only the guilty are privileged to plead the Fifth Amendment. ”

“ When finally the parade started, and I, mounted on Mrs. Scot-Williams' beautiful Lady F, felt myself moving slowly up Fifth Avenue to the martial music of drums, brass horns, and tambourines; sun shining, banners waving, above me my flag making a sky of stars and stripes, and behind me block upon block of my co-workers; I felt uplifted and at the same time humbled.
"Here we come," I felt like saying. "Here we come a thousand strong—all alike, no one higher than another. Here we come in quest. We come in quest of a broader vision and a bigger life. ”

“ The fourth is, all-thing that He hath made.—For well I wot that heaven and earth and all that is made is great and large, fair and good; but the cause why it shewed so little to my sight was for that I saw it in the presence of Him that is the Maker of all things: for to a soul that seeth the Maker of all, all that is made seemeth full little.—The fifth is: He that made all things for love, by the same love keepeth them, and shall keep them [1] without end. ”

“ The undoubted practical effect of letting guilt rest on unexplained presence alone is to force a defendant to come forward and testify, however much he may think doing so may jeopardize his chances of acquittal, since if he does not he almost certainly destroys those chances. This is compulsion, which I think runs counter to the Fifth Amendment's purpose to forbid convictions on compelled testimony. The compulsion here is of course more subtle and less cruel physically than compulsion by torture, but it is nonetheless compulsion and it is nonetheless effective. ”

“ Since of everything that is upon the earth the Fivefold God is the Majesty, the Radiance [?] , the Likeness, the Body, the Soul, the Strength, the Light, the Foundation and the Root. O my God, if in our sin we have unwittingly offended against or caused grief to the Fivefold God by an evil and wicked mind. If we have allowed our fourteen members to gain domination over us. If by taking animated beings with our ten snake-headed fingers and our thirty-two teeth, we have fed upon them and have thus angered and grieved the Gods [?] ”

“ At fifty, I feel myself just reaching my full powers, mentally and physically; capable of more work and better work, more play and better play, and with so many years of work and play ahead of me that I never so much as think of my age or of being any age. I am keen and eager to get right at the next job I have on hand, and to make it a better piece of work than any I have ever done.
The great expectations are not all on the younger side of fifty. But the great satisfactions are nearly all on the onward side of it. Life is not an up-one-side, down-the-other-side hill. ”

“ So when the Count was awaken he sought of many wise folk what might signify that which he had seen in the dream. And when his vision was uncovered, a wise man and ancient bespake him by the counsel of God: “Make great joy, Count, for there shall be born to thee a son full of great prowess and of great holiness; and him thou shalt let bear to Rome and let baptize him by the Apostle.” ”

“ As far back as I can remember, I find that my dominant faculty, the one that has been present in every crisis of my life, great or small, and which is present to-day, has been the faculty, I mean the power and the need of duplication. There have always been in me, as it were, two distinct persons; one who went, came, acted, felt, and another who looked at the first go, come, act, and feel with an impassable curiosity. ”

“ In the preceding Lectures we have delineated the Present Age as a necessary part of the great World-Plan on which the Earthly Life of our Race is arranged, and have endeavoured to disclose its secret significance; we have sought to understand the phenomena of the Present by means of this Idea, to bring them forth as the necessary results of the Past, and to predict their immediate consequences in the Future;—and if we have succeeded in this our undertaking, we have then understood our Age. We have been engaged in these contemplations without thought of ourselves or of our own position. ”

“ Seniors precede, juniors follow. Men precede, women follow. Husbands precede, wives follow. Distinctions of rank and precedence are part of the scheme of the universe, and the Sage adopts them accordingly. In point of spirituality, heaven is honourable, earth is lowly, Spring and summer precede autumn and winter: such is the order of the seasons. In the constant production of all things, there are phases of existence. There are the extremes of maturity and decay, the perpetual tide of change. And if heaven and earth, divinest of all, admit of rank and precedence, how much more man? ”

“ For the past few years, thirty or forty of them, I have been experimenting around and trying to get my bearings and learn what life really is. I have done some pretty raw, inexperienced stuff, but it has been worth while because a young fellow has to go through the experimental stage. It takes time to decide what one really wants to do, and how he wants to do it. But when a man is fifty, with a long life ahead of him and a fair notion of what he wants to do, he begins to be hopeful.
At fifty, I feel that I am about ready to begin writing the eight or ten novels I have been wanting to write. ”

“ Let us talk of our college days, of our travels, of war, of soldiers, and of Italy!
XII. We old classmates will many of us doubtless live to see the twentieth century. Strange thought! I know, of course, that the transition from nineteen hundred to nineteen hundred and one will seem as natural as that from ninety-nine to a hundred, or from this year to next. And yet it seems to me that to see the first dawn of the new century will be like reaching the summit of some high mountain, and looking out over new countries and new horizons. ”

“ In the particular manifestations of the Idea, and its mode of working, which we have adduced in our last two lectures, it appears only in the form of Instinct; for we have there described only the Time which precedes the Third Age, which indeed first makes the existence of that Age possible,—and when Time in general has not yet advanced to the manifestation of the Idea in clear consciousness. Let this distinction be henceforth kept in view to prevent misunderstanding. ”

“ This mode of thought, I said before, will strive to spread itself universally; and in certain masses of the Human Race it will succeed in this, and with them the whole Age will become a camp of mere Formal Knowledge. Who rules in this camp, and leads on its armies?—‘Clearly,’ it will be answered, ‘the Heroes of the Age; the champions in whom the Spirit of the Time has most gloriously revealed itself.’ But who are these, and by what marks are they to be recognised? ”

“ The closing years of the nineties had been years of preparation and development—years of broadening minds and new ideas, until quite suddenly, it seemed, the century turned the corner, and yesterday became old-fashioned in a day, and all eyes were fixed on the glorious sunrise of the twentieth century—the wonderful century. ”

“ God, with all the batteries of omnipotence loaded with thunderbolts, stands it century after century. I have no doubt sometimes an angel comes to Him and suggests, "Now is the time to strike." "No," says God; "wait a year, wait twenty years, wait a century, wait five centuries." ”

“ The generation which was from fifteen to twenty years of age, at the brilliant but fleeting epoch of which I am speaking, is now between fifty-five and sixty. It will be asked whether this generation has realised the unbounded hopes which the ardent spirit of our great preceptor had conceived. ”

“ Until now I have been a raw hand, stopping to adjust the harness, talking about what I meant to do, studying the guide books, getting the stiff wagon greased, laying in provisions, fussing around one way and another trying to find out where I wanted to go, and why I wanted to go there, and how to get there when I started.
At fifty a man should feel younger and stronger and more fit than he ever felt before. ”

“ As surely as our present Age is a part of this Earthly Life, which no one can doubt;—and further, as surely as there are no other possible Epochs of the Earthly Life but the five which we have indicated,—so surely does our Present Age belong to one of these. It shall be my business to point out, according to my knowledge and experience of the world, to which of these five it belongs, and to unfold the necessary phenomena in which the principles above stated must manifest themselves ”

“ TRUTH.
“A century is a formula; an epoch is an expressed thought. One such thought-expressed civilization passes to another. The centuries are the phrases of civilization; what she says here she does not repeat there. But these mysterious phrases are linked together: logic—the logos—is within them, and their series constitutes progress. In all these, phrase expressions of a single thought, the divine thought, we are slowly deciphering the word fraternity.
“All light is at some point condensed into a flame; likewise every epoch is condensed in a man. ”

“ Are the years so very plentiful—such a large number assured to you that you can afford to squander a few, to turn them not only to useless purposes but to bad ones. Can you?—the years!—oh is not it wonderful, the way in which thy Lord and my Lord, thy Creator and my Creator, marks out before our eye the progress of the years? ”

“ Our Age stands, I think, in this Epoch, taken with the limitations which I have already laid down,—namely, that I do not here include all men now living in our time, but only those who are truly products of the Age, and in whom it most completely reveals itself. ”

“ The respect for the Sixties was an article of faith, a dogma of dogmas in the Nineties. If the now younger generation write articles and books about the Nineties—those amazing documents in which I scarcely recognise an age I thought I knew by heart—we were still more zealous in writing books about the Sixties. ”

“ The principle of the Third Age,—that Age which we have undertaken to describe,—is now sufficiently apparent:—this, namely,—to accept nothing whatever but that which it understands. The Comprehensible is its highest Idea;—it is thus Scientific in its form ”

“ Probably they thought it was quite a feather in Noah's cap when one of them stopped him and asked him to write a short paper on the subject, "How it Feels to be Fifty."
"There is a chance for you to produce a wonder," the young fellow said to Noah. "Make the essay just as personal and real and funny as you possibly can. Age is one of the most interesting subjects in the world. Everybody either looks forward to being fifty or back to having been fifty. There is no subject about which human beings think more." ”

“ Well, we agreed that night that we would meet here again exactly twenty years from that date and time, no matter what our conditions might be or from what distance we might have to come. We figured that in twenty years each of us ought to have our destiny worked out and our fortunes made, whatever they were going to be. ”

“ Rather shall I try to lift you above that pain by clear perception of our position, of our yet remaining strength, and of the means of our salvation. For that purpose I shall, it is true, demand of you a certain amount of reflection, some spontaneous activity, and some sacrifice, and reckon therefore on hearers of whom so much may be expected. The demands I make, however, are on the whole easy, and presuppose no greater amount of strength than one may, I think, expect of our age; as for danger, there is absolutely none. ”

“ The truth is that every stage of the journey has its own interests. Probably none is better than another, but my own preference has always been for that stage which I happen to be doing at the time. When I was twenty I thought there was no age like twenty, and now I am fifty I have transferred my enthusiasm to fifty. ”

“ The present is the commencement of our existence; the endowments requisite for its purpose, and a firm footing in it, have been freely bestowed on us:—the future is the continuation of this existence, and in it we must acquire for ourselves a commencement, and a definite standing-point. ”