Notes of a New Year's sermon preached in Union Church by the Rev. A. N. Rowland, Phil. III, 15, 16. Let us therefore, as many as be perfect, be thus minded (i.e., to press on) and if in anything ye are otherwise minded even this shall God reveal unto you, only, whereunto we have already abstained by that same rule let us walk."
At the end of a year we are ready to entertain the mood of reflexion, and recollection. Experience which has been our companion every day of the year comes forward out of the shadows as a counsellor. And it does us good to hear for a little what experience has to say. It is made plain to us that there has been a momentum in our life apart from and above what our own will could supply, a direction given to us quite beyond our own foresight and knowledge. It is proved to us that the things we most dreaded have perhaps contributed to our enlargement, that the things we most desired have sometimes been fraught with limitation and bitterness. It is a most salutary thing to take the comfort and the counsel of experience. It should make us go more safely our remaining years, to have these lessons on humility, repentance and thankfulness—lessons of true wisdom—engraved as it were in our own flesh and blood.
Experience Too NeGativp.
Wise men have acknowledged the advantage that has come io their life through consulting their experience; it puts them in a better position for solving their problems. "I feel less strong in spirit than when I began," wrote Edward Thring in his diary, "instead of stronger as I might have hoped. But after all I know the weight now, and have felt the battle which before I was but marching into." And Maeterlinck gives us this interpretation: '"Today has this advantage over yesterday, that it exists and was made for us. Be to-day what it will, it has wider knowledge than yesterday; and that alone is sufficient to render it more beautiful "and vaster.""
But for all this, to accept experience as our only counsellor would be to renounce our hold on life. God did not make His children opportunists that they should "wait and see." For one thing the voice of experience is so slow, too slow. We can forget, that read it, the letter published the other morning from a young victim of the "Trenches." 'My experience' he wrote, "has been a sad one, and I write these lines in the hope that all young men, like myself, vile dens of vice, where one loses
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.