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Title: New Things
Author: Samuel Osgood [
More Titles by Osgood]
Measured by any human standard, how daring was the vision of the Christian seer! From Patmos, his watchtower of rock in the Ægean Sea, midway between the hemispheres of ancient civilization, he surveyed the ruling powers of the world, declared their doom, and the rise of a new kingdom, even the City of God. The predominant forces of the existing age took visible shape before his inspired imagination. Jewish bigotry, Pagan idolatry, Roman despotism, led on by the master spirit of evil, stood before him, as so many fearful monsters. Equally vivid were the forms of divine agency by which they were to be subdued. From Him who sat upon the throne revealed in heaven, came the decree, "Behold, I make all things new." Our pen need not lose its cheerfulness in writing of this opening year, with such imagery in view.
How much of that vision has been proved true? Enough surely to save it from the charge of presumption, enough to ascribe its daring rather to a devotion mindful of divine guidance than to a wilfulness impatient of delay. The former things have passed away. The old temple is remembered only for the sake of its spiritual archetype. The despot's purple has faded before the bloodstained robes of the martyrs. The idols to which men bowed on both the Ægean shores, the European and the Asiatic, have fallen. Even the crescent, that has for a time displaced the cross, and which now in the city of Constantinople gleams from the dome of St. Sophia, forms no exception to the statement, for it marks no idolatrous shrine, but like the orb which it represents is but a partial reflection of the great source of light, before which it must one day grow pale.
Gradually, but none the less mightily, the new power went on its way, and ere long from beyond the Mediterranean on the Carthaginian shore, there came a great response to the exile of the Ægean. When Augustine wrote his "City of God," the philosopher of history confirmed the vision of the seer, as he celebrated the triumphs of that word which planted the cross above the throne of the Cæsars. Tempting indeed is the historical survey this presented, but we must not yield to the enticement. We must quit this grand prospect of the nations, and speak of the Gospel, as sent chief of all for the renewal of the soul and the redemption of the home. World-regenerating power as it is, its first prerogative is its life-renewing office.
This principle we are prepared to lay down at the outset, that in the order of Providence Jesus Christ is the spiritual head of the human race, and that men and nations find redemption and true life from God through Him. What was said of old, needs to be said now "Behold I make all things new"--now in the ears alike of those who have never heard Christian truth, and of those who have lulled themselves to slumber beneath its familiar sound. Nay, the most sincere Christians need constant renewing in the light of first principles and by the spirit of true life. Their piety is apt to harden into formalism--their charity to narrow into some kind of clanship--their industry to sink into a low worldly prudence apart from all divine aims.
It is not easy for any of us to begin the New-Year without a pleasant sense of freshness or renovation, as if some former burdens had passed away and many things had become new. This is well, and needs only to be made better. As we renew our friendships, we should not fail to renew our relation with the Great Friend, and invoke his blessing upon the opening months.
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We need first of all to review our principles. These we regard as constituting the essentials of our faith. However right they may have been, we are very apt to lose sight of them, or gradually, perhaps almost unconsciously, allow others to creep into their place. The word of Christ to us now is as of old, "Believe." What do we believe? What to us is the greatest reality? Many things are true--what to us is the truth? Many words are important--what to us is the word? Answer not in the language of decent custom or technical phrase, but from the heart. We have all said at some time more or less definitely, "We believe in God, the Creator of the world, in Jesus Christ his Son and express image, in the Holy Spirit, the witness within the soul." When we believe thus truly, then we have the true principles of living. We own the Divine government, acknowledge its representative, honor its form of life. But our belief becomes an empty word, unless with enlarged knowledge and experience, it is constantly renewed; and as we pass into new fields of thought, action, observation, we subdue this added territory to the rightful sovereignty, and interpret all things in the light of Divine truth. Have we done this--are we doing it? Or have we left our faith behind us, and in our world of business or pleasure, do we find ourselves either utterly without God, or with Him only in the most vague and distant idea? True faith is not overcome by the world, but overcomes the world.
We learn a great many things as our years pass, and there is a knowledge--do we not know it? that increaseth sorrow. Such is all the knowledge that shuts out the light of God; and leads man away from a filial faith in the Eternal Parent and the heavenly home. Such stores indeed increase our nominal domain, but only as he would enlarge his estate who were to conquer Sahara and pitch his tent among desert sands where no living water is.
Faith--the faith that God is Father of men--that he is in Christ, and through Him will visit us in the soul and the life, makes all things new--constantly leads us into new experience of Divine truth, and makes old things appear in a new light. This is no narrow creed for the recluse or the mystic. It is for men of all tempers and conditions. Nay, they need it most, whose pursuits are most likely to chain them down to the earth. For them indeed occasional leisure and recreation has no small solace. But, the best solace for world-weariness is the rest of the soul in God; the mind's trust in the greatest of realities, the Being of beings. All pleasure that deadens this trust but adds to the weariness which it would charm away and is the serpent's whisper, that promises the peace which comes only from the heavenly dove. Above all our prudence, all our labors and expedients, we are compelled to look for the true light. Revive, increase our faith, and straightway all things are new. God reveals new features of his Providence, and things familiar have a new expression, and speak no longer only of the earth.
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Who can recur thus to first principles and find from them better light and peace, without carrying the renewing influence into the sphere of the affections? Here the Divine Word has a voice for us--a voice too much neglected because identified either with a perplexing theological system or a shallow sentimentalism. God is love, and he that loveth not knoweth not God. This truth came from Him who made the soul, and knows well its wants. Bring it near to us and feel its renovating power. There seems always indeed to be a peculiar peril in moralizing upon the affections, and they are very apt to be chilled by the precepts that most insist upon their vitality and warmth. But the Christian Gospel is little disposed to waive its imperious claims from fear of the metaphysician or the sentimentalist. It says Love God and the brethren, and bids us make this truth practical. As the years pass, instead of having less affection, we ought to have more. A true life always has more, as it enlarges its experience and its faculty--not indeed more of that superficial sensibility which is the burden of so many moon-struck rhymesters and the great staple of the common romancers, but more of that divine charity, that vital good-will, which holds filial communion with the Father, and, striving to be perfect even as he is perfect, carries the light and warmth of its presence into every sphere of life. In fact, the highest human wisdom is affectionate as it is mature. The novice in thought may be sharp and crabbed, but the sage is tolerant and kind. He who sees the truth in its reality, sees that it is the form which contains and expresses goodness. If there be a kind of intellectual power that is bitter and malicious, it is sure to be only some shape of low cunning or some perversion of the better reason--some perversion that shows Lucifer's fall, if it shine with something of his light. The Master and they who learned of him were full of love as of wisdom. Such is the plan of God's moral government based upon the nature of his own being.
The Father calls us to be followers of him as dear children, and in the sober thought of mature years to cherish more than the impulsive affection of childhood. He demands that our whole life-plan should be guided, nay, pervaded with good-will. If there be less sensitiveness upon the surface of the character, there should be a deeper sentiment within. He is ready to help us win the grace, which he commends. Through devout thought, whether of meditation or prayer--through every act which brings us near to himself, whether of self-denying humanity or of common neighborly kindness, he is ready to impart to the soul something of the fulness of his Spirit, and renew our being in its central spring.
We need this influence in our near affinities and remoter relations. The ice gathers about us, and should be melted away. The most intimate ties become dull and indifferent through custom, and the nearest friends, because of their nearness, lose interest as if estranged. In the same Divine fountain we refresh every home feeling and social sympathy. Realizing anew our relation to God, we are ready to see more of his goodness in all things around, and regard every aspect of humanity, as a call upon us to appreciate his love for us by our own for his creatures. The point of view is at once changed, and we look upon our fellow-beings no longer in the spirit of harsh critics, exacting all things and owing nothing, but as ourselves dependants upon Divine favor, and owing mercy even as we have received. Every human tie is in peril, when this sentiment is forgotten. When its force is felt, every sphere of life has a blessing. Home wears a new smile, and its mutual deference repeats the great law of Heaven. Strifes among kindred and acquaintances cease. The sternest censor of the follies and vices of mankind mingles mercy with his judgment, and considers with thoughtful compassion the infirmities at which the cynic scoffs. Because he opens his heart, he does not shut his eyes, but with judgment keen, yet tender and forbearing, in a spirit wise and benign, nay, Christlike, he looks upon the strange drama of human life, and whilst he cannot wholly solve its problem, sees enough of God in the universe and among men to submit the ultimate solution to the Divine Power, and finds a very sure way of helping on the Divine plans by a life of justice, energy and good-will. Who of us does not need more of this spirit, more sense of God's love to us, as the great source of kind affection to one another?
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For want of it, and of the filial faith in which it has its root, we wither up, and our best strength is lost. Nay, our very work languishes--our labor, whatever it may be, loses its zest. There is no man of generous mind, who has not at some time accepted his life-work in a spirit truly religious, feeling that its burdens are to be borne in a Christian temper, and its duties done with reference to exalted aims. But how often the better purpose languishes, and we pursue our toil away from the fountains of true life, separating the spheres which God has joined together, robbing our daily life of the freshness and power, which our youthful zeal possessed without care, and which need only to be truly cared for to be preserved, nay, to grow in vigor. It is not always so with us, but too often; and there are none who do not need renovation in respect to their life-plan and work. Some things we should do, that we have not done--some things, that we have done, should have been left undone. There is much efficacy in a sober and honest review of our personal career, of what we have achieved, suffered, gained, lost, and of what has been our use alike of our successes and disappointments. God has given to us something of his own power of judgment, and we are the better either by the rebuke or the encouragement of the "Ill-done" or the "Well-done," pronounced by ourselves upon ourselves. More power still comes from bringing all the higher resources of our being upon our labor, refusing to become the serfs of a slavish routine of task-work, and keeping our hours and weeks fresh alike by the faculties that we exert, and the aims to which we look. Happy, indeed, the man, whatever be the sphere of his action, whose being is renewed rather than exhausted by his toil. Only a filial faith and love can insure this blessing. A cheerful temper is much, but not all; and no merely animal spirits can suffice to renovate the mind under so many vicissitudes and disappointments as most lives present. A man's spirit is the chief fact in determining his spirits, and the spirit can be kept fresh and strong only by communion with the God who gave it. They who take the work of life as given by God in kindness, and as to be done faithfully and cheerfully, filially, keep and enlarge their power. Whatever their sphere, they wait upon the Lord, and they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength--they shall mount up with wings as eagles--they shall run and not be weary--they shall walk and not faint.
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Thus following the leadings of Divine Providence, we find the true fountain of life. All things are ever new, and in our faint human experience we are able to know something of the bliss of that Infinite and Omniscient, to whom all things are known--to whom there is no past or future, yet whose is the fulness of an ever-renewing life, the great I Am, from everlasting to everlasting. Existence becomes more serene, yet more earnest; less impassioned, not less affectionate; less impulsive, but far more interesting. There are two kinds of renewal, distant as are earth and heaven. The one comes from the novelty of a constant variety, the other from the freshness of an ever truer life. Just across the sea the exile of Patmos could have found an excellent example to place in contrast with the spirit of renewal which he urged. The Athenian--and he is in this respect more favored with followers than in his Attic refinement--spent his time in seeking for some new thing. Common life was stupid, its business was contemptible and fit only for slaves. Different the spirit, as the lot of this novelty hunter from that of the Christian with his ever renewed mind. The one finds what is new by skimming over surfaces, the other by drawing from inexhaustible depths. The one scatters his forces as he seeks to refresh them, the other concentrates his powers in the very process of renovation. The one yields to a passion for mental dissipation that burns and wastes like a fever, the other follows a law of life, whose pulses beat in ever serener health--nay, beat in ever-renewing vigor, and sound no funeral marches to the grave. In short, the one indulges in a mental distraction that has in itself the principle of exhaustion; the other is nurtured by the Divine aliment which gives a life that is eternal.
Are not our own experience and observation full of illustrations of the truth that has been presented. Are not history and biography constant witnesses of the ever-renovating power of a genuine faith, and love, and work, and also of the fate of worldly passion to exhaust its own springs of enjoyment. How signal an illustration we may take from the destiny of two men of the last century, who, more than any others, moved France and England--the nations to which they spoke. Mirabeau, a man of robust frame and singular native eloquence, was cut down in the very meridian of his day by a disease which was an expressive close and consequence of the fitful fever of his life of passion. His last words, in their gorgeous rhetoric, showed with what opiates he had drugged his soul: "Sprinkle me with perfumes, crown me with flowers, and thus let me sink into the eternal sleep." Within that very month, a far different death-scene was presented across the British Channel. An old man of nearly four-score years and ten, rests peacefully upon his bed, surrounded by a company of friends, who feel quite as much joy as grief, as they look upon his face and hear his words. Although of frame naturally delicate, and of gifts by no means brilliant, he has moved the hearts of myriads by his appeals, and won a name better than that of founders of empires. The very week previous he had continued his round of labors, and his strength was not abated as he pleaded his Master's cause. He sank to his rest in God with the words of the anthem,
"I'll praise my Maker with my breath,"
on his lips, and the strain which was broken by the touch of death seemed to his companions to be finished by a voice from the spiritual world, saying:
"Praise shall employ my nobler powers;
My days of praise shall ne'er be past,
While life, and thought, and being last,
Or immortality endures."
Mirabeau and Wesley! Thus different are the ends of wilful passion and unswerving fidelity. All lives, according as they are true or false, renew this contrast.
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"Behold, I create all things new," saith the Lord. For good or for ill, this decree must be applied to us. In some way we are all changing as the years pass. Our lives are wasting away, unless they are renovated by a truer spirit, and thus winning ever more than they lose. What do we most need that time may be ever newer and happier, and the hours move on neither with lagging weariness nor drunken haste, but in the Divine order marked out for them by their Lord?
Are there not some things to be put off, as well as some things to be put on? Answer honestly as we look the New Year in the face--answer as to a messenger from God. What weight are we carrying, that we need to lay aside? What evil habit is fixing itself upon us, shutting out the light of God, chilling the better affections, deadening the nobler powers, and threatening, perhaps, beneath its insidious smile to take from existence more of its beauty and joy and strength? Let each consider well his own besetting sin, and put it off. With the falling burden, scales fall from his eyes--he sees God anew. For him the former things have passed away--all things are become new. What makes our being fresher and happier than the conviction that the coming years are better than the past!
Off with the old burdens, and put on the new armor. There is something for each of us to do--something for each one of us specific and peculiar as our own individuality--something for all of us as universal as our common humanity. The specific thing and the universal good pursue as if for life itself. God bless us in the striving, and crown us in the work. Each year in its sober experience give us new hopes for ourselves and the future of our race.
New Year.[The end]
Samuel Osgood's essay: New Things
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