22 CENTENNIAL HISTORY
lumber, is a proper subject for felicitation on account of youth. You have been hugging yourselves because you are a hundred year old, and are trying to put on a suitable show of dignity, but age is relative, not absolute. There are some people who are older at 25 than others are at 75. "We live in thought, not years-in deeds, not in figures on a dial"-and churches, like individuals, keep young by keeping at work. It is do, dig, or die. We cannot concede that you are old in the presence of those who are so much older than you are. When boys meet they greet each other with : "How are you old man." When old men meet they say, "Well, my boy, how are you ?" In looking over the ages of our Conference of Churches, I was astonished to find that 12 out of the 23 English speaking churches had their beginning either in sixteen or seventeen hundred and something, which makes a church founded as late as 1805 seem quite young-almost on the verge of the cradle-roll or the milk-tooth period. Two of our local churches were 166 years old when this church was founded; several more had already celebrated their first centennial ; even your sister church in West Haven was already eighty-six years old. It gives one a startling impression of the venerableness of our Congregational Churches in this state to remember that so many of them are so much older than the government of the United States. A hundred years are not long to one or anything that expects to live to be a thousand, and then to put on a fresh coat of paint and a new roof and go in for another thousand. A hundred years are long in the life of a crow. It has lived out its usefulness ; but who will declare what the appointed time is for the church of Him who inhabiteth eternity and of whose years there is no end? (3) And so, in the next place, will you accept my felicitations concerning your vigor, and rejuvenation. Most churches away from the larger towns and cities suffer the loss of young