For almost any reason it is good for us to be delivered from our
prevailing absorption in the present. Whatever counterpoises the
overwhelming weight of the present is, so far, a blessing and a good,
and whatever softens the heart and keeps up even the lingering
remembrance of early, dewy freshness and of the high aspirations which,
even for a brief space, elevated our past selves is gain amidst the
dusty commonplaces of to-day. We see things better and more clearly when
we get a little away from them, as a face is more distinctly visible at
armslength than when held close.
But our retrospects are too often almost as trivial and degrading as is
our absorption in the present, and to prevent memory from becoming a
minister of frivolity if not of sin, it is needful that such a question
as that of our text be urgently asked by each of us. Memory must be in
closest union with conscience, as all our faculties must be, or she is
of little use. There is a mere sentimental luxury of memory which finds
a pensive pleasure in the mere passing out from the hard present into
the soft light, not without illusion in its beams, of the 'days that are
no more.' Merely to live over again our sorrows and joys without any
clear discernment of what their effects on our moral character have
been, is not the retrospect that becomes a man, however it might suit
an animal. We have to look back as a man might do escaping from the
ocean on to some frail sand-bank which ever breaks off and crumbles away
at his very heels. To remember the past mainly as it affected our joy or
our sorrow is as unworthy as to regard the present from the same point
of view, and robs both of their highest worth. To remember is only then
blessed and productive of its highest possible good in us, when the
question of our text insists on being faced, and the object of
retrospect is not to try to rekindle the cold coals of past emotions,
but to ascertain what effect on our present characters our past
experiences have had. We have not to turn back and try to gather some
lingering flowers, but to look for the fruit which has followed the
fallen blossoms.