1. Take first the Time that is Past. We: say it has gone beyond recall. As the miller said when he watched the water churned to foam below his mill: You cannot grind with the water that has passed." So the time that is gone cannot provide us again with opportunity. But although the past has gone out of our reach, it can reach us none the less. It is affecting us now. We cannot be free of it though it is free of us. It brings motives and hindrances, persuasions and prohibitions, causes either an ebb-tide of regret against which we have to struggle, or a flood-tide of encouragement which helps every stroke we make. This Hyde and Jekyll influence of the past is illustrated in Whittier's lines:
"Who, looking backward from his manhood's prime, Sees not the spectre of his mis spent time?
And, thro' the shade Of funeral cypress planted thick behind, Hears no reproachful whisper on the win From his loved dead?
Yet who, thus looking backward o'er the years, We all know that influences which reach us from the past may be either happy or depressing and may either help us on or hold us back. There are some now standing aside who would have been ready enough with help and inspiration if they were not checked by some disabling memory, while others have within them an extra spring of energy from the influence of the past.
What shall we carry into the New Year? If time is in the hand of Christ, we can leave our past with Him. You say how can that be? Well, we cannot finally explain the mystery, but it is like this, The past as it affects us is chiefly a matter of consciousness. But Christ may also be a fact of consciousness? And if he comes into the mind he inevitably transforms the past, so that it can no longer be injurious or disabling. Let me give an illustration. There are people captive to-day in asylums because some fact of their past is override ing their minds. They are bound from within by the way they lock at things, not by the things themselves. And on the same lines but in the opposite direction we can be freed from within by taking into our minds the Christ force, which so far as the past is concerned is called forgiveness.
Let this be the first fact for us
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.