It is a mere illusion of sense that the past is gone utterly. 'Thou
carriest them away, as with a flood.' We speak of it as irrevocable,
unalterable, that dreadful past. It is solemnly true that 'ye shall no
more return that way.'
But there is a deeper truth in the converse thought that the apparently
transient is permanent, that nothing human ever dies, that the past is
present. 'The grass withereth, the flower fadeth,'--yes, but only its
petals drop, and as they fall, the fruit which they sheltered swells
and matures.
The thought of the present as the harvest from the past brings out in
vivid and picturesque form two solemn truths.
The first is the passing away of all the external, but of it only. It
has all gone where the winter's cold, the spring rains, the summer's
heats have gone. But just as these live in the fruitful results that
have accrued from them, just as the glowing sunshine of the departed
ardent summer is in the yellow, bending wheat-ear or glows in the
cluster, so, in a very solemn sense, 'that which hath been is now' in
regard to every life. The great law of continuity makes the present the
inheritor of the past. That law operates in national life, in which
national characteristics are largely precipitates, so to speak, from
national history. But it works even more energetically, and with yet
graver consequences, in our individual lives. 'The child is father of
the man.' What we are depends largely on what we have been, and what we
have been powerfully acts in determining what we shall be. Life is a
mystic chain, not a heap of unconnected links.
And there is another very solemn way in which the past lives on in each
of us. For not only is our present self the direct descendant of our
past selves, but that past still subsists in that we are responsible
for it, and shall one day have to answer for it. The writer of
Ecclesiastes followed the statement just now quoted as to the survival
of the past, with another, which is impressive in its very vagueness:
'God seeketh again that which is passed away.'
So the undying past lives in its results in ourselves, and in our being
answerable for it to God.
This metaphor is insufficient in one respect. There is not one epoch
for sowing and another for reaping, but the two processes are
simultaneous, and every moment is at once a harvest and a seed-time.
This fact masks the reality of the reaping here, but it points on to
the great harvest when God shall say, 'Gather the wheat into My barns!'