THE PAST AND THE FUTURE.*

I TAKE as my starting-point the fifteenth and sixteenth verses of the fifth chapter of Ephesians: "Look therefore carefully how you walk, not as unwise, but as wise, buying up the opportunity," "redeeming the time," as it is in the old version; "buying up the opportunity," as it is in the margin, and probably the more correct translation.

Time is here spoken of as opportunity, as something which we should be at pains to gain the control of and be able rightly to use. But what is time? Where is it? How is it at our disposal? The old theologians have speculated a good deal as to the matter of the relation between God and time, as to whether there was any such thing as time with him. For we know that what we mean by time is only an orderly sequence of sensations on our part, or springs from the fact of the rotation of the earth on its axis and its revolution about the sun. If the earth rotated more slowly or more swiftly, if it took a longer or shorter period for making its circuit about the sun, our ideas of time, of day, of night, of a week, a month, a year, would be completely transformed. So that you see this matter of time is a purely relative one. It has been said that with God there is no such thing as time, that he dwells in an eternal now, that the past and the future must be ever present to the All-knowing One. I do not propose to go into a speculative question like this. I only wish to suggest to you the query whether in a certain very important sense it be not equally true of us. There is no yesterday, and there never will be a to-morrow. Whatever we think, whatever we do, always has been and always

* Stenographically reported.

must be thought and done now. we call yesterday, it was now.

Before the sun set in what

When the sun rises in what

we call to-morrow, it will still be now. The past and the future, then, in a certain very real sense, are only dreams: they are not real. There is only the instant that is gone while we say it and yet which is eternally here. We talk sometimes about a future life. We raise the question as to whether we believe in a future life, as to whether those of our friends that we talk of as dead have gone into the future life. A little careful thought will show you that this is really a misuse of terms. If the friend that died yesterday or last year, is alive, he is not in a future life, he is alive now. There or here, whether it be here in the seen or there in what to us is at present the unseen, it is present life through the whole universe. There is only this instant. And yet in another sense, and one that is very real, there is a past and there is a future; and blessed it is for us that it is so. It seems to me sometimes, as I think of it, one of the most wonderful things in all the world. We talk lightly, flippantly, contemptuously sometimes, about this common human nature of ours, about ourselves, our neighbors, our acquaintances; but yet, when I think merely of this fact that there is for us a past and a future, I feel like bending my knees in the presence of the commonest man, it is so wondrous.

Where is this past? What is this thought, this brain, this memory of ours, that makes the years agone, clear back to the days of our childhood, so vividly present? Where do we keep the past? Where is this future? Out of what do we construct these marvellous ideals, these dream-worlds that thrill us, that inspire us, that lift us? What is it that lifts, that thrills, that inspires? What is this shadow of something that is not and never was, but that we believe shall be, and which is mightier in ier power than anything else in it! Try to imagine it, where we carry the past and where we keep the future; and, if you can partly comprehend it

us to day and has a mightall this world? Think of

only, you will come to feel that the place trodden by even the commonest man is holy ground.

The past! Blessed is the fact that it exists as a place of refuge, a place where we go for comfort, a place where we go for rest. When I am weary, I need only to rest my head on my hand and close my eyes to the actual world about me, and the past is all here again. I am lying under the tree on that sunny day, that tree on the hill-top overlooking the river. I am watching the clouds float lazily across the blue. I am hearing the wind in the treetop. I am seeing the sunlight glance on the water. Or I am playing over the old games with companions and school friends that I have not seen for years, perhaps shall never see again in this life. Or, tired out at night, filled full of play, I am seeking the old familiar doorstep, crossing it with my weary feet to find rest in the presence of her who is childhood's mother still. If you have lost a friend, you have only thus to go back and live over the life that has become so sacred, so dear to you.

And then this world-memory that we call tradition, that we call history, how real, how living that is, and how in periods of depression or discouragement strong men, who are giving their life to their race, love to forget for a time the turmoil and worry, the burden and hea tof the day, and go back to those quiet mornings that tradition tells us of! Whether they be real or not, they are real enough as places in which the imagination, the soul, may find rest. So the past of the individual life and the past of the world-life does exist as a place of refuge, a place of comfort, a place of quiet and peace, for those who are weary and are heavyladen.

And the future which shall be,- nay, which is, this wondrous world created by what we so lightly name imagination, and yet can no more comprehend than we can comprehend God,― the future is real; and how many of us to-day are re-creating in that future the castles in Spain that dissolved like morning mist during the time that we call the past year!

The past year, no matter what we have done, no matter what we may have achieved,—the past year of all of us is full of broken fragments of the unachieved. We have attempted a thousand things that we did not accomplish. We dreamed of a thousand things that we did not actually grasp. We hoped for a thousand things that we did not attain. In hardly any direction of our lives, perhaps, can we look without finding something begun or planned last year that is still unfinished. And what do we do? It is a blessed thing, I find no fault with it, I do not criticise it,it is a blessed thing that we can dream again, and that we can say: "This year the flower that withered will blossom." "This year we will put the dome on to that building of our character, of our lives, that was shattered in fragments last year." "This year we will accomplish the piece of work we were not able to do last year: we will read the book that we dreamed of and found no time for last year." New opportunity, new hope. And so, forgetting the things that are behind and reaching forth to the things that are before us, we press towards the mark, the mark that ever recedes,— and so is leading the race in that progress that shall have no end, because God is infinite and eternal.

The past, then, and the future both, in this higher sense, are real. Where are they? They are here: they are all about us. In imagination we picture those scenes that were in the far-off centuries; but all that was important in those far-off centuries, all that was of value to the on-going life of the race, all that was true, all that was good, all that was blessed, is here. It is in us, it is round us, it is the air we breathe. We sometimes talk of the olden time as better than the present. We talk of it as wiser than the present; but all this, when we think a little carefully, we know to be sheer and simple illusion.

We

Consider the matter of wisdom for just a moment. know the past better than the past knew itself. They tell us to go back to the sayings of this grand old book for all the wisdom of the world. But all that the writers, the

dreamers of the Bible knew, we know to-day, and know better than they did. The world was never so old as it is this morning, never so experienced, never so wise. We know Isaiah better than the people who walked and talked with him knew him. We know better the importance of his work, the place that his visions and sayings occupied in the line of the world's development. Just as, for example, a man who is under the smoke or in the midst of a battle does not know that battle half as well as we do a hundred years from the time, when we have gathered up all the circumstances that led to it, all the conditions that surrounded it, all the results that have flowed from it, when we see the place that it occupies, the relation of what went before and what has come after. We understand the battle of Gettysburg better to-day than General Meade did when the battle was concluded. We know Jesus better than his contemporaries knew him. We sometimes think we would like to have lived in Jerusalem or Galilee at that time, and seen him face to face and talked with him. But we know him better than Matthew knew him, better than John knew him, better than any of his contemporaries or friends knew him. We see him now as a part of the world's scheme, we know the relation in which he stood to the general growth of humanity. So all the wisdom of the past is here. As Emerson sang, with such insight into the eternal truth,

"One accent of the Holy Ghost

The heedless world hath never lost."

And, then, this other notion that I referred to, that the past is better than the present, is again a pure and simple illusion, quite natural perhaps, because we have become accustomed to things, and we are apt to think that they are better than things which are new. But the world was never so wise as it is now. Society was never so good as it is now. The average length of life was never so great as it is now. The average degree of health was never so high as it is to-day. The world has been growing from the beginning,- the phys