1[ Tell me what things you can remember easily, and I will tell you what manner of man you are ; whether you are cultured or coarse, scholarly or vulgar, healthy-minded or morbid. The humorist has a mind stored with jokes and anecdotes, the philosopher can recall a complicated train of reasoning without an effort, the cheerful man remembers his holidays and his joys, the melancholy his trials and bereavements and losses. And so it runs through the complicated varieties of human temperament and character.^
2. According to the teaching of most of the people who wrote the books of the Bible, memory is a gift of God — a gift to be used especially for spiritual purposes. Nearly the whole of a man's spiritual life rests upon some foundation of memory ; he naturally and inevitably goes back to this first source of his spiritual in- spiration, to those first moments of spiritual consciousness, to those days when the truth of God was more vivid than it is now, to those springs of the religious life which can be traced slowly back, as the source of a great river can be traced to the spring on the mountain-side. It is in this direction and for reasons of this kind that the religious life with some people is so vivid and so clear ; and it may be clear and vivid with every one of us if we will use this discipline of memory which God has put into our hands.
IT There is a remarkable passage at the close of Augustine's Confessions, in which he searches his mind for the root of his knowledge of God, and he finds it chiefly in his memory. "I come," he says, "... to the fields and spreading courts of
» E. Griffith-Jones.
DEUTERONOMY viii. 2 5
memory, where are treasures of unnumbered impressions of every kind. . . . For there the heaven, and the earth, and the sea, and all that in them is, which I have been able to discern by sense, are ready to my hand. . . . There, also, I meet with myself and I remember myself, what I did, and when, and where, and in what way, when I did it, I was attracted by it. ... A great amazement fills me when I think of this ; surprise astounds me. And men travel to enjoy the heights of the mountains, and the mighty billows of the sea, and the wide tides of the rivers, and the expanse of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars, and leave themselves behind, and feel no wonder that though I speak of these things I do not see them with my eyes ; and yet I could not speak of them did I not see them in my memory, in those spaces so vast, mountains and billows, and rivers and stars, which I have seen, and ocean, of which I have heard, as though I were looking at them without. ... So great is the power of memory, so great the power of life in mortal man. "What shall I do then, 0, Thou my true life, my God ? I will pass even through and beyond this power of mine which is called memory ; yea, I will pass beyond it [0, Thou who madest all things contained in memory, and the memory itself that contains them] that I may attain unto Thee, 0 sweet Light, who shinest through all things." In this fine passage we have a faithful record of what passes through every devout mind. In the cavernous recesses of memory, as well as in the vast universe outside, dwells the Divine Spirit, and if we cannot find Him in that inner chamber, it will do us little good to find Him elsewhere."
3. The Book of Deuteronomy is full of suggestions about the use of memory ; about the kind of things we ought to remember, and the purpose for which we ought to remember them. Let us refer to some of these texts in succession, and let us see what suggestions they have for our life. One of them is the present text, which will thereafter be taken up by itself and treated fully.
(1) "Eemember the day when thou camest forth out of the land of Egypt " (Deut. xvi. 3).
The day when thou camest forth out of the land of Egypt. What day was that? It was the birthday of the nation. To remember it meant to print upon the heart the sense of an original and inexpressible debt to God. It was God who had brought Israel out of Egypt. It was He who did it by His great power and outstretched arm. It was He who made a way for
6 REMEMBER ALL THE WAY
them through the sea; He who had overwhelmed their enemies in its depths. Whatever Israel might forget, they were never to forget that great event which gave them birth as a nation. They were never to escape from beneath the impression of it ; never to lose the sense of their immeasurable debt to God.
What day is that for us ?
What strictly answers to it is the day when God's redeeming love in Jesus Christ first shone out before our eyes, and took possession of our hearts. That is the day when we came out of the land of Egypt. But is it a day in the calendar ? Is it a day that everybody can date? There are people like St. Paul who always remember that day on the road to Damascus. And though John Wesley remembers the very spot and the very hour, " nine o'clock at night in the Moravian Meeting House in Fetter Lane," when the light of the Gospel of the glory of God shone into his heart, and he knew that there was instant, full, and free salvation in Jesus Christ for every man, yet it is quite possible that many Christians should be just as unconscious of the time of their spiritual birth as of their natural birth.