Part 10 (2/2)
This explains all man's progress in knowledge and culture. As the fruits and flowers rise rank upon rank in response to the advancing summer, so all that is most refined and exalted in man's mind or heart bursts forth in new ideals, reforms, revolutions, in response to the revelation of that personal presence from whom all hope and aspiration incessantly proceed.
Hope's n.o.ble ministry hath grievous enemies. Among these let us include a false use of the past. Yesterday contains sins and mistakes, but mult.i.tudes err in dwelling too much upon their wrongs. Each man hath had his temptations, each his fierce conflicts and defeats, each bears grievous scars from the battle-field. Yet if one constantly revives all his old sins life will be filled with hideous specters.
Memory will become a place of torment and a ghastly chamber of horrors.
We shall be the children of despondency and wretchedness. Memory will be a graveyard; the past will give no light save the ”will-o-the-wisp”
light from putrescence and decay. All the springs of joy will be poisoned by morbid griefs that keep open old wounds. The city hath its offal heap where refuse matter is destroyed; each home its garret, the contents cast out at regular intervals; the individual throws away his old clothes, old tools, old vehicles. Why should not the soul have its refuse valley--where the past is cast out of life and memory?
Farmers' boys sometimes set steel traps by shocks of corn whither come quail and prairie chickens. Stepping upon the traps, the cruel jaws close upon foot or wing and the bleeding bird beats out its life upon the frozen ground. Memory often with cruel jaws holds men entrapped.
A single error wrecks the whole life. But once forgiven of G.o.d let the sin go. Reflection upon past sins is good only so long as it produces revulsion from sin, and like a bow shoots the soul toward G.o.d and righteousness. G.o.d is like a mother who forgives the child's sin into everlasting forgetfulness. Man should be ashamed to remember what G.o.d forgets. ”I will cast your sins into the depth of the sea.” Someone says: ”G.o.d receives the soul as the sea the bather, to return it cleansed--itself unsoiled.” Gather up, therefore, all thy sins--old wrongs, old hatreds, burning angers, memories of men's treachery; stuff them into a bag and heave them into the gulf of oblivion. Your life is not in the past, but in the future. ”We are saved by hope.”
Mult.i.tudes may embitter their new year by undue reflections over opportunities neglected and lost in the past and denied in the present.
Professor Aga.s.siz tells of a friend who sold his farm in Pennsylvania for $5,000 to invest it in Dakota, and after losing all in the new home returned to find the German who purchased the homestead had found oil and great wealth in a swamp which he had tried to drain off. An old gentleman recently told of his refusal in 1840 to accept as payment of a small note a lot on a corner in Chicago now worth a million dollars, and he shed bitter tears over the loss of property he never owned.
When Ali Hafed heard of the diamonds in India he sold his estate and went forth to seek his fortune. His successor, watering his camel in the garden, saw the gleam of gems in the white sand and discovered the Golconda mines. Had Ali Hafed had eyes to see his would have been boundless treasure at home instead of poverty, starvation and death.
These and similar legends stand for the opportunities that have gone forever. How many neglected their opportunities for education; how they knocked unbidden at every door and no man opened. Others were denied culture, and now feel they are unfulfilled prophecies. Many by one error have injured eye or ear or lung or limb or nervous system.
They grievously handicapped themselves. Others by ingrat.i.tude, infidelity to trusts, treachery to friends, have poisoned happiness.
Repentance is theirs, and also forgiveness, but not forgetfulness. The past is full of bitterness.
Let the dead past bury its dead. The future is still ours. The trees in October willingly let go their leaves to fall into the ditch. Their life is not in last year's leaves, but in the infant buds that crowd the old leaves off. Put forth new activities. Open new furrows. Sow new seed. All the tomorrows are thine; but they are few and short.
Fulfill his dictum who said: ”I am as one going once across this vast continent; I would lean forth and sow as far as hand can scatter my seed. Let the angels count the bundles.” No man should be discouraged in whom G.o.d believes, preserving him in life. Let hope in G.o.d sweeten life's bitterness.
Another enemy of hopefulness is found in nervous excesses and overwork.
Men drain away their vitality. Ambitions unduly stimulate the brain.
Many break the laws of sleep and the laws of digestion and the laws of nerve sobriety. They spend their brain capital. Then they grow hopeless toward home and business. Ill-health spreads a gloom over all life. Every judgment is pessimistic; it could not be otherwise. The jaundiced eye yellows the landscape. The sweetest music rasps like a file upon the nervous ear. Thomas Carlyle's pessimism was largely physical. He overworked upon his life of Oliver Cromwell. Maurice once said: ”Carlyle believed in G.o.d down to the time of Oliver Cromwell.” Once, in a moment of depression, Lyman Beecher prayed: ”Lord, keep us from despising our rulers, and help them to stop acting so we cannot help despising them.” Poor, nerve-racked Pascal, grew fearful lest his affection for his sister, who had nursed him through a long illness, was sinful. One day he wrote in his journal: ”Lord, forgive me for loving my dear sister so much!” Afterward he drew his pen through the word ”dear.” Hope and trust toward G.o.d go with health.
Sickliness is not saintliness. G.o.d cannot save by hope what man destroys by ill-health.
Dean Stanley used hopefulness as a test of all systems of truth.
Rightly so. G.o.d is the G.o.d of hope, and his truth, like himself, carries the atmosphere of good cheer. The falsity of medievalism appears in this--it robbed men of joy and gladness. G.o.d was the center of darkness. His throne was iron. His heart was marble. His laws were huge implements of destruction. His penalties were red-hot cannon b.a.l.l.s cras.h.i.+ng along the sinner's pathway. Repentance toward G.o.d was moving toward the arctics and away from the tropics. Christianity was anything but ”peace on earth, good will to men.”
Philosophers destroyed G.o.d's winsomeness. The reformers came in to lead men away from medievalism back to G.o.d himself. Men found hope again in redemptive love. They saw that any conception of G.o.d that dispirited and depressed men was perverted and false. No man hath done more to establish this fact than him who long ago said: ”Any presentation of the gospel of Jesus Christ that does not come to the world as the balmy days of May comes to the unlocked northern zones; any way of preaching the love of G.o.d in Christ which is not as full of sweetness as the voice of the angels when they sang at the advent; any way of making known the proclamation of mercy which has not at least as many birds as there are in June and as many flowers as the dumb meadows know how to bring forth; any method of bringing before men the doctrine of salvation which does not make everyone feel, 'There is hope for me in G.o.d--in the divine plan, in the very nature of the organization of human life and society,' is spurious--is a slander on G.o.d and is blasphemy against his love.”
Hope hath her harvest also for teachers and reformers. Often men think their work is squandered. They seem to be sowing seed not upon the Nile, to find it again abundantly, but in midocean, to sink and come to naught. Parents and teachers break their hearts, fearing their watchfulness and instruction have failed. Men sow wheat and wait six months for a harvest; but they sow moral seed Sunday and on Monday whip their children because the seed has not ripened. They forget that apples bitter in July may be sweet in August. To-day's vice in the child is often to-morrow's virtue, as acid juices through frost become saccharine. Yesterday the mother rocked a little angel in the cradle; to-day she moans: ”Alas, that I should have rocked a little fox, a little serpent, a little wolf!” To-morrow the child becomes a model of truth and integrity.
The sage might have said: ”It is good that woman should hope and wait.”
Truth's errand has always been a successful errand. Not a single social truth or civic truth or moral truth has ever been lost out of the world. Secrets of cruelty and fraud, secrets of oppression and sin perish, but nothing that makes life happier or better hath been forgotten. We do not have to keep G.o.d and truth alive, they keep us alive. Vegetable seeds can be killed, but not moral seeds. When G.o.d issues his silent command to the earth flying into winter and wheels it back toward summer, it is given to no man to put a brake upon warmth; nor can he go up against the spring with swords and banners. But easier this than staying the upward march of mankind. G.o.d is abroad upon a mission of recovery. Open thy hand, O publicist! and sow thy seed. The seed shall perish, but not the harvest.
Our childhood was pleased with the story of the old monk who was s.h.i.+pwrecked alone on a desert isle. He always carried with him a few roots and seeds. Planting these, he died, but sailors coming twenty years later found the isle waving with fruit trees. To the beauty of this legend let us add the truth of one who has made all this land his debtor. In 1801 a youth pa.s.sed through western Pennsylvania. He was collecting apple seeds with which to found orchards in the then unbroken states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Michigan. When he came to an open, sunny spot in the forest he would plant his seeds and protect them with a brush fence. Years afterward new settlers found hundreds of these embryo orchards in the forests. Thrice he floated his canoe laden with seeds down the Ohio to the settlers in Kentucky.
To this brave man, called by our Congressional Record ”Johnny Appleseed,” whole states owe their wealth and treasure of vineyards and orchards. This intrepid man is a beautiful type of all those who, pa.s.sing through life's wastes, sow the land with G.o.d's eternal truths, whose leaves and fruits heal nations. If G.o.d remembers the roots in dark forests he will not forget his truths in human hearts. Therefore, sow thy seed. Ye are saved by hope.
The ground and basis of all hope whatsoever is G.o.d. It is his good providence and redemptive love in Jesus Christ that make us optimists.
Hope is not within the scope of our wisdom or culture or skill; and hope is not in our health or tool or treasure. We journey into an unknown future. It is not given to us to know what a day or an hour of the new year may bring forth. How impotent are the wisest and strongest in the hour when we hear the sound of the ocean and in darkness ford the deep and dangerous river, beyond which is high and eternal noon. What can the child on some great ocean steamer caught in a winter's storm do to overcome the tempest? Can it drive the fierce blasts back to their northern haunts? Can its little hand hold the wheel and guide the great s.h.i.+p? Can its voice still the billows that can crush the steamer like an egg-sh.e.l.l? Can its breath destroy the icy coat of mail that covers all the decks? What the child can do is trust the Captain who has brought this same s.h.i.+p through a hundred hard storms. It can rest and trust and hope. And all we upon this great earth-s.h.i.+p have been caught, not in a storm, but in the gulf stream of G.o.d's providence. The warm tropic currents sweep us on to the heavenly harbor. The trade winds above aid the forward flight. More than all else is the larger planetary movement that sweeps gulf stream, winds and s.h.i.+p onward towards the infinite. Soon shall we enter into quiet waters and cast out our anchor.
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