Life's Byways and Waysides: Chapter 23 - The Duty of Forgetting
By J.R. Miller
It is a great thing to learn to live in the future. Paul put the lesson in very plain words when he said, "Forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are ahead, I press toward the mark!" To get the full force of these words, it must be remembered that they were written when Paul was an old man. It is no unusual thing for the young to look forward. The world is all ahead of them. They have only stepped on the edge of life, and there lies ahead of them--an unopened, untraversed future, full of bright, beautiful visions and brilliant hopes. It draws them forward by its thousand golden possibilities of attainment, achievement, success. It is full of sweet-voiced birds of promise. Youth has no past, nothing to leave behind; all its treasures are on ahead. It is natural, therefore, for the young to look on, and press forward.
But ordinarily it is not so with the old. As the years advance, they look back more and more. The future has less and less to draw them on. The past is their treasure-house; it holds the best things of their life, their best work, their sweetest joys, their tenderest friendships. They have little more to win. In the short path before them, there are but few flowers which they can hope to pluck. There is but little room for new achievement. They can make no new friendships. It is natural for the old to look backward--to live in memory, not in hope.
But here we see an old man--who lives wholly in the future! He was a prisoner. He was broken by much suffering and hardship. It certainly was not a bright earthly outlook--that he had from his dungeon grating. Would you not say, looking at him, that the best, the brightest, the grandest part of his career--was behind him? What could there be in the future for that weary, broken old man? What new lands could he hope to explore? What new achievements could he expect yet to make?
Yet here he stands, amid his life's evening shadows, and declares that his sublimest work lies yet ahead of him, that he has not yet attained his life's goal, that his best has not yet been reached. "I care nothing for anything in my past," he says; " it does not satisfy me. It is not worth counting. Old and broken though I am, hemmed in, too, by these oppressive limitations, these walls, these chains--yet I am not at the end of my life! An unquenchable hope lives in my heart, and the star of my life shines far onward."
So we see him there, in the thickening shadows of life's evening-time, in the mists of gathering twilight--weary, worn, wearing chains--but still full of hope, still straining every energy, still reaching forward; still forgetting the past, still drawn irresistibly on toward some great aim, some glorious goal which lies beyond, unseen by mortal eyes. At length, night falls upon the vanishing form; it passes out of our sight; we see the old man going at last to a martyr's death. But his eyes are yet fixed on something bright and glorious beyond! In the last words we catch from his lips, he speaks of a crown laid up for him. The last glimpse of him we have, with white locks tossed by the wind, with eyes fixed steadily and intently upon the Beyond, he is still pressing on!
The secret was this: he had in his eyes a distinct and definite future; a future not bounded by death's horizon--but running on into eternity! Immortality was real to him. No runner in a race ever saw goal or garland more vividly--than this glorious, eagle-eyed man saw the end of his course, the goal of his life! Nor was it any earthly vision that drew him on; had it been, hope would have been dead in his heart in the broken years of his old age. He saw life sweeping on through death and beyond it--and so he looked forward to the future, when he would reach his loftiest attainments. Nothing good, beautiful, true, or real--would end for him at the grave.
