1078
THE KING’S BUSINESS
gave the repentant thief for all his blood- red yesterdays, let bygones be bygones. This was Colonel Hadley’s plan. He never inquired into the record of anyone, no matter how dark it was, for, he said, “God is willing to forget, and why should not I?” Now I plead for forgetting the past in the sense: that it shall not be a criterion by which to judge the future. Many peo ple oppose things simply because they are new. “We never had it before” is suf ficient argument for .them. The old-time religion and the old-time rut its good enough for me. My grandfather never rode in electric cars; my grandfather never had printed bulletins in his church; and I hope I never shall. Very well, dear old friend, if that is the way you feel about it. Meanwhile you mustn’t criticize those of us who are not living on our grandfather’s reputation, but are men enough to stand on our own platform. Maybe it is not as good as the old, but it is at least ours. Paul says he could have lived on his past if he had wanted to, but he didn’t want to. III. A Beckoning Future. I picked up a hymn book in the Montrose Auditorium and turned over the leaves, I noted one hymn by May Whittle Moody: “I Have Nothing to do with Tomorrow.” Well, in a sense she means what is true: I cannot carry tomorrow’s burden ’till it comes. No, but here is the true picture: I am traveling a dong road day by day. Now, I can’t travel tomorrow’s miles ’till I get there, but I can see tomorrow’s sun shining down the road. You can’t deprive me of tomorrow’s beckoning, inspiring light, and I can think meanwhile how much bigger man I’m going to be by that time. Nobody can stop me from “yearning beyond the sky-line” of today. A writer in ' “The Homiletic Monthly” some years ago discussed the fact that all things are prospective: the impulse of -a river is always onward; animal organism builds on toward man—image of God; thoughts and affections fly beyond the
limits of now. Why all this? He says, “Because there is a future and a God.” God has gone on before and broken a path. The reason we insist on climbing the mountain is because Another’s foot steps have broken the way. If there is no God, let the atheist tell us the meaning of this stirring toward the future. It is a good thing to have a goal and to have it way beyond you. You know how they do at athletic meets. They have a receding goal. As soon as a man has reached his former record for pole-vault, hammer-throw, or 220-yard dash, does he stop and sit down? No; they put the bar higher each time, for a growing athlete wants a growing goal. What if they do tell him to rest on his oars and that he can never reach aim, he knows that other men have heen laughed at and have done the impossible, and so he takes his place in the long line of martyrs who have been laughed out of court by those who couldn’t see the vision they saw and were satisfied with three meals a day and a fair wage. He knows that there are problems in mathematics where the correct answer can never be obtained -though you worked for years, but each figure brings it nearer. He knows that he has an Asymptote some where and though by hypothesis he will meet the line only at infinity, yet he is approaching closer all the time. He knows that visionary life—the life that has a goal before it and expects the goal to come to it. While the visionary life has a goal before it and works its way to that goal; so he takes Paul’s motto: “Forgetting” and dissatisfied, “I reach forth unto those things which are before.” IV. A Unified Aim. “This one thing I do.” One good thing about Paul was that he kept his motto— didn’t merely have it framed in glass or crocheted in silk on the wall." When he was a lad studying at the feet off Gamaliel, this one thing he did: got an education. When he was an orthodox Jew, he was a Pharisee of the Pharisees—this one thing
Made with FlippingBook Online newsletter