| J.R. MIller | Page 5 |
St. Paul teaches us the same lesson in a remarkable passage in one of his epistles. He gives us a glimpse of the ideal life, the perfect life in Christ. He says frankly that he himself has not yet attained this sublime height, has not reached the best. “Not that I have already obtained, or am already made perfect.” But this unattained life he does not regard as unattainable, — he will come up to it sometime. “I press on.” He is like the boy in Longfellow’s “Excelsior.” At the foot of the mountain he stood, gazing at the far-away radiant heights, but he wasted no moments in mere gazing. Carrying a banner which bore his motto, he began to climb. Disregarding all allurement, he kept on in his ascending path till he was lost sight of in the storms of the mountain crest. Thus St. Paul, this man of quenchless ardor, pressed his way toward the highest and best. He was in prison now, but prison walls were no barrier to his progress. He tells us, too, the method of his life. The two words which contain the secret of his noble career were — “forgetting,” “reaching.”
There were certain things that he forgot. Look at this a moment, for the word contains for us a secret we must learn if we would make progress northward. “Forgetting the things which are behind.” “Remembering” is a favorite Bible word. We are constantly exhorted to remember, and urgently counseled not to forget. It is perilous to forget — to forget God, to forget the divine commandments. We are not to forget our past sinful condition, lest we grow cold. But there is a sense also in which our only hope is in forgetting. We never can get on to higher things if we insist on clinging to our past and carrying it with us. We can make progress only by forgetting. We can go forward only by leaving behind what is past.
For instance, we must forget our mistakes. There are many of them, too. We think of them in our serious moods, at the close of a year, when we are forced to review our past, or when some deep personal experience sets our life before us in retrospection. We sigh, “Oh, if I had not made that foolish decision, if I had not let that wrong companionship into my life, if I had not gone into that wretched business which proved so unfortunate, if I had not blundered so in trying to manage my own affairs, if I had not taken the bad advice which has led me into such hopeless consequences, how much better my life would have been!”
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