Anonymous

By the Rev. George Matheson, M.A., D.D., F.R.S.E., St. Bernard's, Edinburgh.

"But many of the priests and Levites and chief of the fathers, who were ancient men, that had seen the first house, when the foundation of this house was laid before their eyes, wept with a loud voice; and many shouted aloud for joy."—Ezra iii. 12.

One of the finest and most poetic touches of human nature occurs in the most prosaic book of the Bible—the Book of Ezra. It is like a single well-spring in a dry, parched land, like one lingering leaf of autumn in the heart of winter. It is found at that scene where the foundation of the new Temple is laid. The passage thus records the mingled feelings of the spectators: "But many of the priests and Levites and chief of the fathers, who were ancient men, that had seen the first house, when the foundation of this house was laid before their eyes, wept with a loud voice; and many shouted aloud for joy."

The passage is suggestive for all time. We see it repeated at the opening of every January. Nay, it is not limited to inauguration days; it recurs wherever youth and age are found side by side. At the presentation of every new thing there are two attitudes among the crowd—the young shout and the old weep. They are looking through two different glasses—hope and memory. Neither of them is worshipping in the building in which they stand. Youth sees the house gilded by the rays of to-morrow; age beholds it overshadowed by the light of yesterday. Youth claps its hands over its coming possibilities; age says, "It is nothing to what used to be in the old days." Youth disparages the first temple, and says the new is better; age exclaims with the Scottish poetess:—

You will observe that in neither of these cases is the attitude pessimistic. Both see roses; both are agreed that a happy time is somewhere; but they differ as to where the roses lie. Youth sees them at the end; age beholds them at the beginning. The one has placed its Garden of Eden in the future; the other has planted it in the past. Both are optimists; but they seek their goal by opposite ways. Youth is for advance; it cries with a loud voice, "Speak to the children of Israel, that they go forward." Age is for retreat, for regress toward a former day; it would say with the ancient poet, "Return unto thy rest, O my soul."

Which is right? Neither. Both are one-sided; each ignores something in the other. Let us begin with youth—the tendency to disparage the past, to set hope against memory. It forgets something—that hope is itself an inheritance of the past. Why does youth clap its hands previous to experience? It is because the young man has got in his blood the experience of past generations, and the result has been on the side of happiness rather than of misery. If the result had been on the side of misery, youth would not have hoped; it would have despaired. Instinct is the fruit of past habit; instinctive hope must come from long prosperity. Christianity itself has propagated from sire to son an inheritance of hope; Christ in us becomes the hope of glory. Paul declares that the highest ground for hope is to be found in the past: "He that spared not His own Son, shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?" He means that nothing in the future need be too much to expect after this exhibition of love in the past. The handing down of such a thought is alone sufficient to create sunshine. It causes the average child in a Christian population to be born an optimist—to come into the world with an expectation of blue sky, and to dream of a good for which he has no warrant in personal experience.

But if youth is one-sided in disparaging the past, age is also so in disparaging the future, in dwelling on the past exclusively. The old man tends to say that the former days were better than these. If he could get back to these former days, he would make a discovery. He would find that, in point of fact, there was not one of them which was not lit by to-morrow's sky. Take the boy's game. To one looking back through the years, it seems to have been a pure enjoyment of the hour; in truth, it was never so. What the boy saw was more than the game of play; it was the game of life. To him the game was an allegory: it represented something beyond itself—the chances of the world. That which made him glad in his success, that which made him sad in his defeat, was not mainly the fact but the omen. The game was to him rather a sign of the future than an event of the hour. Or take the girl's doll. Was that purely a pleasure of the hour? Nay; the hour had very little to do with it. She was living in a world of imagination—a world to come. The doll to her represented motherhood. She had already in fancy a house of her own. She reigned; she administered; she managed; she had put away childish things. There are no moments so speculative as our real moments; no sphere is so full of to-morrow as what we call the events of the hour.

But, although each view separately is one-sided, there is an extreme beauty in their union. It is one of the finest laws of Providence that youth should see the end at the beginning, and that age should see the beginning at the end. Let us glance at each in turn. Let us begin with youth. And let us remember what is the problem before youth: it is, how to advance. Now, I have no hesitation in saying that nothing causes us to advance but a vision of the future. Paradoxical as it may sound, if there is to be progress, the end must get behind the beginning and push it on. No other vision will impel us forward. The past will not. I do not think the effect even of bright memories is stimulating; they tend rather to make us fold the hands. The present will not. How short is the effect of any actual joy! If a windfall comes to you, you contemplate it perhaps for a few moments exclusively; presently you say, "What will my friend think when he hears of it?" The thing itself is not sufficient. It cannot bear the weight even of five minutes. It is incapable of self-sustenance. It would die at its birth if it were not supported by to-morrow.

Therefore it is that God leads on the youth of individuals and communities, not by a sight of their environment, but by a vision of the end. He shows them the end without perspective—without the years between. He knows that by nature the child ignores all between—that in the presence of any coming joy he cries, "Not to-morrow, nor to-morrow, nor to-morrow, but the next day." And so our Father has always begun by showing us the next day. He came to Abraham and said, "Get thee out of thy country, and I will make of thee a great nation." He did not tell him that Egypt and the desert and the Jordan lay between. If He had, his steps would have been paralysed on the threshold. Did you ever ask yourself what is the earliest revealed doctrine of the New Testament? Is it justification, sanctification, effectual calling, the perseverance of the saints? No, it is none of these: it is the second coming of Christ—the completed glory of redeeming love. When Paul sat down to write his first epistle to the Thessalonians—the earliest book of the New Testament—he began at the end. He let the world hear the final bells ringing across the snow. He concealed the snow; he veiled the intervening years; he said, "To-morrow." He did not tell that a Red Sea of trouble and a desert of visionless waiting lay between. And he was right. Men heard only the bells, and the bells lured them on. They helped them to tread the snow; they nerved them to cross the sea. They sustained them to meet the desert. They sounded nearer than they were; they rang ever the one refrain, "Christ is coming"; and the persistent strain of to-morrow hid the jarring of the passing day.

But if it is benevolent that youth should see the end at the beginning, it is no less a bounteous provision that age should see the beginning at the end. "Say not that the former days were better than these" is a counsel wise and true. But it is none the less wise and true that to the eye of the old man the past ought to be glorified. It ought to be glorified because it needs to be glorified. The past never got justice while it was passing. Childhood ignored it; youth disparaged it. The hour laid gems at our feet which we did not see, or which, seeing, we despised. We kept asking when Elias would come; and Elias had come already. To us, as to Moses, the hand of God was laid over the face while God was passing by; we did not discern the actual blessings of the day. Are we never to discern them here below? Must we go hence without seeing the world in which we dwell? Shall we be sent forth to gaze on things unseen before we have looked at the objects which have been actually in our hands? God says "No." He says the past must be righted, righted on the earth, righted by the earth. He has appointed a day even here in which each man shall judge the world in which he has dwelt—in which he shall reverse his former judgment. The crooked shall be seen straight, the rough places shall appear plain, the glory of the Lord, which was veiled in passing, shall be recognised in retrospect; and the end will pronounce the beginning to have been indeed very good.

Therefore it is that the eyes of the aged men rest more on the old house than on the new. The old is to them really a new house. They have seen it for the first time. They did not see it when they were living in it; their eyes were then on the coming temple, and the voice of the present God spoke to them unheard. Therefore, on the quiet road to Emmaus—the road of life's silent afternoon—God shows them the disappearing form of yesterday; and, like Jacob, they exclaim in deep surprise, "Surely the Lord was in this place, and we knew it not; this was none other than the house of God."

And this explains something which otherwise I could not understand. In the Book of Revelation the host of the redeemed in heaven are represented as singing two songs—the song of Moses and the song of the Lamb. Why two? The song of Moses I can readily understand; it is the triumph of the future—the shout over the coming emancipation. But why sing the song of the Lamb? Why chant a pÆan over the sacrifices of yesterday? Why allow the dark memories of the past to dim the glory of the approaching day? Is there not something which jars upon the ear in the union of two anthems such as these?

No; there would be something jarring without it. All other heavens but that of the Bible sing the song of Moses alone; they ask nothing more than to be free from the pain of yesterday. The heaven of Christ would be content with no such aspiration. It deems it not enough to promise the joys of to-morrow—the golden streets, and the pearly gates, and the luscious fruits of an unfading summer's bloom. It seeks to connect the future with the past, to show that in some sense the glory had its birth in the gloom. It would reveal to us that the golden streets have arisen from our desert, that the pearly gates have opened from our brick walls, that the luscious fruits have sprung from the very ground which we used to deem barren. It would tell us that the crown has been made from the materials of our cross, that the day has come out of our dusk, and that we have climbed the heights of Olivet by ascending the steps of Calvary.

And is not the heaven of Christ true in this to human nature? What you and I are seeking is not merely nor even mainly emancipation. That would be something, but not all; I want a justification of my past bonds. It is not enough to be able to say "I am all right now." Have I not wasted time? Are there not years which the locusts have eaten? Might not this emancipation have come sooner? Why should I not always have been free? Is it any vindication of God's dealings with Job that at the end he gets back houses and brethren and lands? No; that is a mere appendage to the story. The patriarch wants to learn, and we want to learn, why he was afflicted at all. We are not satisfied merely because the grey is followed by the gold. We wish to know that the grey has made the gold. The song of Moses may tell how the peace came after the storm; but the song of the Lamb alone can say, "God answered Job out of the whirlwind."

Our future, then, like our present, must be a blending of memory and hope. The stones of the heavenly temple must be stones that have been hewn in the quarry of time; otherwise they will not sparkle in the sun. The marriage supper of the Lamb is a union of to-morrow and yesterday; no other bells will ring Christ in for me. Grace is not enough; it must be justifying grace—grace that vindicates my past. In vain shall I walk by the crystal river, in vain shall I stand upon the glassy sea, if the light upon each be only the sun of to-morrow. My sea must be "glass mingled with fire"—calm that has been evolved by tempest, rest that has grown out of struggle, beauty that has shaped itself through seeming anarchy, joy that has been born of tears. To-morrow morning and yesterday evening must form together one day—a day in which the imperfections of the old house will explain the symmetry of the new, and in which the symmetry of the new will compensate for the short-comings of the old. So shall the first and second temple receive a common glory, and memory and hope shall be joined for evermore.

Matheson