The Dead Past

Only the ingrate would fail to acknowledge the blessings that are ours from the toil and talent, the heroism and self-sacrifice, of past generations. But let us be careful that while the past with one hand confers blessings, it does not with the other encumber us with traditions and beliefs that would proscribe our possibilities, fetter our free limbs, and manacle the present with the faults and failures of the past.

Many a poor sufferer would go free, could he realize that "Every day is a fresh beginning," could he know that the past can touch the present only with the power of Good; if he could realize that expiation, remorse, regret, despair, cannot be fastened upon man in God's present, and that sin and sickness, the gloomy shades of yesterday, must vanish when the light of Truth breaks along the horizon of to-day.

Mark Anthony, in his artful appeal to the rabble of Rome, says,—

The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones.

How well it sounds! how it catches the ear and fastens itself in the memory! But is it true? Is not good immortal, is it not the evil that is interred with men's bones?

As Christian Scientists, we recognize that loyalty to Truth's ideal inevitably antagonizes error and involves burden-bearing on this plane of consciousness as we follow the footsteps of the Master; but we are daily asserting and demonstrating, so far as we can, the nothingness of error in the present, why, therefore, should we immortalize the error of the past? Why ponder and emphasize the doleful lessons of history and predicate of every good deed inevitable persecution? Is it ordained of God that the virtuous must be sacrificed? Is it not rather that mortal mind precipitates its own sentence through our fear of precedent, and our superstition?

In our old belief of two powers,—good and evil, with evil more than half the time in the ascendancy,—this slavery to past mistakes, ignorance, and sin was consistent; but with the nobler teaching which Christian Science brings us of the omnipotence of Good and the impotence of error, we can, both as a people and as individuals, refuse to accept as our legacy from the past anything but good.

Reformation righteously and rightfully dismisses the sins of the past with, "I never knew you!" We are not affrighted by the phantoms of misspent yesterdays since "we acknowledge God's forgiveness of sin in the destruction of sin, and in the understanding that evil and sin are unreal, hence not eternal" (Science and Health, p. 497); and our glad hearts believe, with our own Whittier,—

That all of good the earth has had
Remains to make our own time glad,
Our common daily life divine,
And every land a Palestine.

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"There is no Strife"

March 21, 1903

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