1. St. Paul was a man who had to bear about with him throughout his life t;^ bitter memory of a misdirected past. He had become an Apostle, the chief agent in the propagation of the Christian religion ; but he^ could not escape the memory of days when he had done everything to thwart the religion which he now confessed. He had persecuted the Church and stood by while its first martyr was stoned to death. As he thought of
* T. H. Champion.
362 PRESSING ON
these things, they paralysed his apostleship. Who was he that he should be a leader ? "I am not worthy to be called an apostle." He was, however, sane enough to see that, though this ^..past could not be effaced, it could be atoned for. A habit of mind, he concluded, must be cultivated which lets the dead p6,st bury its dead, drops one's paralysing mistakes just where they are, and leaves one free to press forward to the high calling which lies before.
But the chief thing that St. Paul had in his mind when he spoke about forgetting the things that are behind was not his past sins but j;^ther his past attainments. He had already made 8^ae_prcigress in the life of faith. Most of us would say he had made a great deal, and would feel atinost envious of him, think- ing, Would God we were only half as far on as he was ! What patience, what courage, what zeal, what self-denying love, what a readiness to bear the cross, what untiring faith he had mani- fested in weariness and watching, in hunger and thirst, in cold and nakedness ! Now, that was just what St. Paul especially wished to forgetj Past attainments in grace were not, in his view, things to dwell on ; they were only stages to be left behind-
^ In that old foot-race on the isthmus of Corinth the men who competed for the prize did not stop every now and then to look back with complacency upon that portion of the course which they had already traversed. Nor, when they had run a certain distance, did they sit down and say, " It is enough." The coveted crown would never have been theirs, had they done so. Moreover they would have been disgraced in the estimation of all the onlookers. They forgot the things which were behind, and reached forth unto those which were before. Even so in his life-course did St. Paul.^
2. Strictly speaking, the continuity of life cannot be diArided at any point, and what is behind put away as forgotten, rolled up, folded as a garment and laid aside as if no more a part of us. We cannot deal with the past in this way, nor would it be well with us if we could. Up to whatever point we have run our race, we have not merely, like the swift runner, passed over ground to be forgotten, we have also accumulated experience, and added to the sum of our life moments which can never be forgotten, which
^ A. C. Price, Fifty Sermons, iv. 62.
PHILIPPIANS III. 13, 14 363
have entered into its texture, and given it direction and colour which it will more or less always keep. We cannot forget the past in this sense, and of course St. Paul did not mean that we should. No man knew human life, or all the depths of the spiritual life, better than the Apostle. He knew very well, as we all know, that there must be so far a conscious continuity in life, a thread of loving association and memory binding it all up, making it what it is of happiness and misery to any human being. There are dark days which still leave their lengthening shadows upon us, it may be from a distant past, which we cannot escape. And again, there are dear and ever-bright faces that shine out upon us from the shadows, and there is the echo of loving voices, long silent, sounding in our hearts, never to die away. All this gives the past an irrevocable hold upon us.
^ "The past is myself ..." cries Eobert Louis Stevenson. " In the past is my present fate ; and in the past also is my real life." Truly it was no shallow thinker who said, " Poor is the man who has no yesterday." ^
^ The winter leaves or bud-scales of a tree leave behind them, . (Z^rt^ when they drop off, a peculiar mark or scar on the bark, just as the summer leaves do when they fall. On every branch a series of these scars, in the shape of rings closely set together, may be seen, indicating the points where each growing shoot entered on the stage of rest. And so every experience through which we pass, every act we perform, goes into the very substance of our being, and we can never be after it what we were before it. We cannot undo our deeds, or altogether escape the consequences that have followed them. The past is indelible, and the memory of it remains like a scar upon the soul.^
3. True forgetting really means Imer mem^>p|y; it is displacing iC^W*<i one memory by another, by a strongeFohe, "an-antidotal one. It means concentrating on the second phase so that the first is weakened and neutralized, and fades out like a well-treated ink- stain. It is removing a weed from the garden of thought and then planting a live, sturdy flower in its stead. It is cultivating new interests, new relations, new activities. Time helps wonder- fully, but especially when we go into partnership with her.