He was over eighty years old

yet still physically agile and mentally sharp.

What made him interesting, however, was not so much how had aged well, but how much he had experienced and how much good he had done for so many decades.

The young people could only marvel as he spoke of things that seemed to them ancient history but that he himself had lived through. He was a living link to the past.

And the link reached back even further than his lifespan, as great as it was, for when the old man was young, he had learned much from the old men of that day, especially one old man they said had lived to be ninety.

Thus when young people now gathered around the old man, he could tell them of things that had happened more than a century before and that he had heard from someone who had actually been there, someone who spoke of amazing events with simple, wonderful words:

This is what we proclaim to you:
what was from the beginning,
what we have heard,
what we have seen with our eyes,
what we have looked upon,
and our hands have touched

-- we speak of the word of life.
(1 John 1:1)

St. Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna and disciple of St. John the Apostle, was martyred for the faith on this day in the year 155 at the age of 86.