S. NEW EXPERIENCES.

NEW EXPERIENCES. For ye have not passed this way heretofore, — Joshua 3:4.

It was just before the entrance of the children of Israel into Canaan that these words were spoken to them. For three days their camp had been stretched along the low hills which skirt the Jordan, and on this fourth day the officers of Joshua went through their ranks to give them the last commands. They said, "When ye see the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord your God, and the priests, the Levites, bearing it, then shall ye remove from your place and go after it. Yet there shall be a space between you and it, about two thousand cubits by measure. Come not near unto it, that ye may know the way by which ye must go; for ye have not passed this way heretofore. "And Joshua said unto the people, "Sanctify yourselves, for to-morrow the Lord will do wonders among you." As he spoke the Jews became solemn. Their long journey in the desert was over, and the mystery of an unknown country and an unknown life lay before them. They looked across to where "fair Canaan stood, and Jordan rolled between;" and all their pettier life was hushed, and they grew serious and thoughtful.

It was the impressiveness of a new experience. It was the departure from what was familiar, a long habit of life, and the near entrance upon something new. That always makes men serious when they realize it. A ship’s company who have lived together for a few weeks, growing accustomed to their shipboard life, at last draw near the land toward which they have been sailing, and it is always striking to see how a quietness and seriousness seems to come over them in the last hours before they go on shore. New things are waiting for them there. They are going to exchange the familiar for the unfamiliar; so there is little of lightness and much seriousness. And this is the way in which life keeps its solemnity. It is always opening new and unexpected things to us. There is no monotony in living to him who walks even the quietest and tamest paths with open and perceptive eyes. The monotony of life, if life is monotonous to you, is in you, not in the world. It may be that you think all days alike, and grow weary with their sameness, and get none of the stimulus and solemnity which comes from constantly reaching unexpected places and experiences. If it is so, you are very much to be pitied. You cannot think what a different, what a more solemn and delightful, place this world is to a man who goes out every morning into a new world, who is Adam over again every day, who starts each day with the certainty that he "has not passed that way heretofore." The horse in the treadmill does not live a life more different from the horse on the prairies than your life is from such a man’s. And if we leave out of account the merely superficial and unreliable difference of animal spirits, the fundamental difference of the two lives lies in the difference of their perception of God. It is God, and the discovery of Him in life, and the certainty that He has plans for our lives and is doing something with them, that gives us a true, deep sense of movement, and lets us always feel the power and delight of unknown coming things. Without Him a life must sink into weary monotony, or escape it only by artificial and superficial changes.

Let us look to-day at this power of unprecedented things, and try to get some idea of the true way to approach them. And if we think of this story of the Jews we get at the first principle of the matter immediately. What made the seriousness and impressiveness of their entrance into the Promised Land was the mixture of the new with the old which it brought. The land into which they were to go was new. Never before had their feet trodden the western bank of Jordan. The very unseen bed of the stream itself was to be uncovered that they might pass through. But into this new land they were to be led by the old familiar ark which had led them all the way from Sinai. A new land, new wars to fight, by and by new towns to dwell in, a new life to live, but into it all the old power was to guide them, in it all they were to live by the same old principles and under the same old care. It was this application of the old principles to the new life that gave the seriousness to their position. If there had been nothing of that sort, if they had been going to leave all behind them, and this new world were wholly another world, where nothing of their old experience should be available, where the ark could not lead them, where God could not keep them, there might have been fright and terror as they prepared to enter; but there would not have been that bright, calm, thoughtful seriousness which burns in the words of Joshua, and seems to glow on the faces of the waiting Hebrews all through the verses of this significant and graphic chapter. They are asking themselves about God. They are wondering what He has in reserve for them. They are gathering up all that they have known of Him. They are pondering how their thoughts of Him will be modified and enlarged in the new experience. The past and the future, like the waves of two great oceans, are meeting in their minds as they stand waiting for the ark to move and the crossing of the Jordan to begin. And this is the power of every approach to what is unprecedented. It is that we cannot leave behind the old even when we go on into the new. It is that every passage into new and untried things brings out the essential principles under which we are living, unsnarls them from the multitude of accidental things with which they have been entwined, brings out their real character, develops them into their fuller force and clearness. Let us see how this is true in several ways.

Apply it first of all to the changes which are coming all the time in the circumstances of our lives. These changes are either great or small. Their real greatness or smallness depends upon the power which they possess over the principles by which we are living. No change in life is small which really brings into new shapes the laws and principles which we are living by. The naturalist over his microscope watches with the intensest interest some just perceptible transformation in some obscure part of an animal system, because he sees that the laws of life of that system are working themselves out there in new shapes to new results. Now when a change comes in the circumstances of our lives you will see, I think, if you consider it, that what makes it interesting is that you go into the new condition the same man that you have been, and that some new development of your old character comes out in the newer life. If you go and stand in the midst of London, or climb to the top of the Pyramids, or set yourself in the middle of a snow-field of the Alps, it is a thrilling and delightful experience. What is it that makes it so? It is that you carry your old self there. Some accidental parts of yourself you have left behind in Boston, but your essential self, with your habits and your ways of thinking, you have carried there; and the wonder is to feel this identity of yours standing among these unfamiliar things, beaten by the waves of this strange city life, frowned on by the hoary ages, or lighted by the glory of the everlasting snows. You realize yourself there with a strange and sharp distinctness; and then you feel this identity of yours, without ceasing to be itself, becoming larger for the new things about it, accomplishing its completest thought and life, prophesying for itself destinies, declaring for itself capacities, as it did not do at home. These are the two pleasures of the traveler who has any disposition toward philosophy and self-inspection. The new places where he goes first bring out his own familiar individuality into clearness, and then ripen it to some finer quality or larger size; but this of course depends upon his carrying his old self there with him. If he did not do that, London and Egypt would be no more to him than they are to the Londoners and the Egyptians who have lived there always; whereas they really are many things to us which they cannot be to them. And now let it be the going, not from Boston to Egypt, but from wealth to poverty, from poverty to wealth, from health to sickness, from sickness to health, from one business to another business, from one home to another home. The poetry and lesson of it all seems to me to lie in this, that the change of life takes its value from the continuity of life. The change of life first brings out the fact of what you are, and then proceeds to work its changes in that fact. You have been apprehending God after one fashion, from one point of view, while you were a poor man; now, behold, wealth is opening before you. Bright paths unfold themselves all carpeted with flowers. You have not passed that way before. You are going to enter it next week when the fortune drops from the ripe tree into your lap. And when you have entered there, what will really be the significant and interesting fact to yourself and other people? Not certainly that there is one less poor man in the world and one more rich man, — as if the poor man that is gone and the rich man that has come were wholly different beings who had no relation to each other, — but that this rich man was the poor man, that he has come into wealth with the experiences of his poverty, that he is filling out the idea of God which he got when he was poor, by the new sight of God which he is having inside the walls of gold. Oh, my dear friends, when any of the changes of life draws near to yon, whenever God is leading you into new circumstances, clasp with new fervor and strength the old hand which you have long been holding, but prepare to feel it send new meanings to you as it clasps your hand with a larger hold. And since you are always entering into some new life, whether it mark itself by notable outward change or not, always hold the hand of God in grateful memory of past guidance and eager readiness for new, — that is, in love and in faith.

It is by this same principle that we are able to picture to ourselves the natural and healthy way by which men ought to pass from one period or age of life into another. The principle is, that the new and unprecedented is to be entered under the guidance of the old and familiar, the old and familiar being expected to show themselves in altered and larger ways when they have brought us into the new. Evidently such a principle would redeem the fragmentariness of life, and make it one great, growing whole. For there come great breaks in men’s spiritual history as men pass from one period of life to another. The worst and the most seemingly irreparable of them all is that one to which apparently people have made up their minds as if it were something that could not be avoided. I mean the break between the child’s religion and the man’s, — the violent break which comes in later boyhood and earlier youth, when, having ceased to obey mere authority and to believe what he is taught implicitly, the human creature has not yet attained the faith and life of reason and personal conviction. A young man’s life is full of novelty. "You have not passed this way heretofore" seems written upon every fascinating new pathway down which he walks. His freedom is a novelty. His bold beginnings of individual reason are all new. Behind him, with a river rolling between, there lies that despised land in which he was a child, bound to obey what others commanded, and not knowing enough to doubt what others said was true. What shall we say about the progress which the boy seems to have made across the gap that lies between him and his childhood? Shall we not certainly say this, that the progress is natural and healthy and good, that the gap is unnatural and bad? It is right that he who has been a child in leading-strings should rejoice in the conscious power of walking alone. It is wrong that he should cast aside all the culture and strength which he gathered while he was being held and carried, and should insist on counting those years all thrown away. The boy, aware that the years are close upon him when he must act for himself and hold his belief upon his own conviction, is foolish if he does not accept the responsibility, and seek to understand the world and the faith with which he has to deal; but he is no less foolish if in the desire for manliness and originality, he throws away all that has been taught him as a child, and grows contemptuous about it. The true birth of manliness, the true originality of the boy coming to be a man, is seen in him who, taking the faith and discipline of his childhood, makes it his own, applies it to his own life, finds its peculiar adjustments to his own character. I think there is no better condition of the human nature to contemplate than that of a young man dealing truly and seriously with the faith of his fathers which has been implicitly his childhood’s faith. He finds new questions rising which he never dreamed of. He sees new tasks unfolding most perplexingly. The belief in God and Christ which has been vague to him begins to grow clear as his new needs call out new reality from it. As his faith becomes clearer, no doubt it changes in this part or that. The faith which is shaping for his manhood evidently is not to be wholly the same as that in which he was trained. He is to see more of God, he is to see God differently; but the essential thing is this, that it is to be the same God whom he has been seeing, that he is still to see. There is to be no dreadful gap in which, with crude impiety, he rebels against God altogether. It is to be an enlargement of faith as he makes it his own, not a flinging away of faith with a mere possibility of finding it again someday. This is the meaning of a boy’s, or a young man’s, confirmation. That is the time in life when confirmation ought to come. Not in mere childhood, when the life is still wholly under other people’s influence; not, unless it has been put off by neglect before, in those later years when manhood is an old story, and the nature is hard with long doubt and hesitation; but it ought to come just when the new freedom is beginning to be felt, when obedience to authority is opening into personal responsibility, when the implicit faith is Just asking for its soul of reason, and anticipating the changes which shall make it the peculiar faith of this peculiar life, — then it is that confirmation has its fullest meaning. It is the gathering up of all the faith and dutiful impulse of the past that it may go before the life into the untried fields. All later times for it — though it is good indeed to seize them if the true time has been allowed to slip by — all later times for confirmation are as if the Jews had forgotten the ark when they crossed the Jordan and had to send back for it when they were fighting their hard battles before Jerusalem or Ai. But the boy’s confirmation is like the host refusing to cross the river, beyond which lay the untrodden land, unless they saw the ark going through the water first, so that they could follow it.

All this applies indeed to every change from period to period of life. The poetry of all growing life consists in carrying an oldness into a newness, a past into a future, always. So only can our days possibly be bound "each to each by natural piety." I would not for the world think that twenty years hence I should have ceased to see the things which I see now, and love them still. It would make life wearisome beyond expression if I thought that twenty years hence I should see them just as I see them now, and love them with no deeper love because of other visions of their lovableness. And so there comes this deep and simple rule for any man as he crosses the line dividing one period of his life from another, the same rule which he may use also as he passes through any critical occurrence of his life; Make it a time in which you shall realize your faith, and also in which you shall expect of your faith new and greater things. Take what you believe and are and hold it in your hand with new firmness as you go forward; but as you go, holding it, look on it with continual and confident expectation to see it open into something greater and truer. No doubt there is something which every critical change in the circumstances of life, or a change from one period of life to another, gives us the chance to cast away and leave behind. No doubt the Israelites left in heaps the accumulated rubbish of their desert journey, — their worn-out clothing and their ragged shoes, — on the eastern bank of Jordan; but they took the ark with them. So let every call that comes to us to enter into new and untried ways be to us the summons to leave our worthless way and foolish sins behind us, but to tighten our hold on truth and goodness, to renew the covenant of our souls with God before we go on where He shall lead us.

I think, again, that the picture of the relation between the old and the new which is seen in our story throws light upon the true method and spirit of all change in religious opinions. The change of one religious opinion for another is, if we think of it, a profoundly serious thing. It is an alteration in our thought of God; and if our thoughts of God are real thoughts, they decide what we are. And so a change in our thought of God must be a change in us. "As he thinketh in his heart, so is he," said Solomon. And a different way of thinking in our hearts ought to make us different men. But there is little of this feeling of seriousness very often in the way in which people say that they change their faith. A light and careless toss from creed to creed seems often to be all that one can see. "I used to be a Unitarian, but now I am a Trinitarian." "I used to think so and so about eternal punishment, but now I have changed my views and think so and so instead." You know how frivolously in the gaps of other talk people say things like these. And there is no community where such words are heard more plentifully than in this community where we live. It is not good. I think that the most stationary bigot, who is what he is for no other reason in the world except that he has been it for so long, is better than this vagrant among the creeds. But yet there must come changes of religious faith. Men and women do go on, led by God, step by step, until they come where what has seemed to them to be true, seems to them to be true no longer, and something which they once disbelieved has opened to them its soul of truth. Another spiritual prospect opens to them which they never saw before. God is different; the Bible is very different; Christ is profoundly different; and their own natures reveal to them sights which are all strange and unexpected. These are not the people who parade their change of faith. These are not they who, having been noisy partisans of one creed, are heard in a few days among the noisiest of shouters for another. They are people with whom the change has come in silence. In their quiet rooms, in calm and prayerful thought, taking deep hold of them so that they are wholly ready to accept the consequences of their faith and be something different because of the new belief they hold, in silence that is full of fear and hope, slowly and patiently, so their new view of truth has come to them. But it has come. No longer is there any doubt about its imminence. They stand upon the brink of the thin line that separates them from it. No longer can the full entrance into it be delayed.

There is no sense of newness and inexperience in the world like that. No change of outward circumstances can for a moment match it. "You have not passed this way before" seems to be rung into the soul’s ears out of every new application of the new-learnt truth to everything. And then, just then, when all seems new, and we are bewildered and exalted with the opening spiritual prospect, then is the time to call up the Ark of God, which may have fallen in the rear, and to set it clearly in the front. Then, when you are going forth into regions of spiritual thought that are new to you, then you need to put all the honesty and purity and unselfishness of your nature in the van of your life; then you need to review and renew your old covenant with God; then you want to have all your earnestness, all your sense of the value of truth, refreshed in you. Believe me, my dear friends, this is the only salvation of a man who is compelled to change his opinions of religious truth, that in doing it he should become a more spiritual man. If he does not, the change will demoralize him. It is so in the world. A change of creed coming in a frivolous and unspiritual age shakes the whole fabric of religion; but a change of religious thought among men full of religious earnestness is quickening and reviving. Do not let yourself contemplate any new view of truth, though you be sure that it is truer than the old, unless you are sure that what leads you to it is a deep desire for holiness and a real love of truth, and a real love of God. "Where they lead you, you may freely go, and the land shall be very rich under your feet. The principle which we have been studying seems to furnish again the law of all more distinctly spiritual life and progress. It furnishes the law of the conversion-time, for there the new and old unite; we pass on into the new under the guidance and assurance of the old. What is it that comes in that day when a man begins the Christian life? Across a resolution which may be hard or easy for him, he sets forth into a new way of living. How often I have tried to tell to you the story of that newness! How many of you have known it well out of your own experience! He who has been living alone begins to live with God. He who has been living for himself begins to live for other men. New motives are open within him; new tasks are spread before him. Old things are passed away; all things are become new. And yet consider! Is not a very large part of the impulse which propels the new life born of the late discovered knowledge of what the life has been before? If you want to make a man a Christian, how shall you begin? Will you tell him of Christ as if then for the first time he and Christ had anything to do with one another? Will you emphasize the moment of the change so strongly that it shall seem as if, before that, as he had cared nothing for the Saviour, the Saviour also had cared nothing for him? No; you will tell him, if you know your blessed work, of a power which has been in his life from the moment that his life began. You will bid him open his ears and hear the voice of a Saviour who has been always pleading. You will call up, out of the past, signs of God’s love which he has never seen, but which have been always there. You will set those signs of a love which has always been, at the head of the progress which is yet to be. You will say, "I beseech you therefore, brother, by the mercies of God that you present your body a living sacrifice to Him." "By all the love which He has shown you when you were most ungrateful now give yourself to Him, and go forward in His service."

Conversion would be something very different from what it is if this were not so. The old life would go for nothing. No motive, no teaching, would come out of it. It would be as if the stream of Jordan were the stream of Lethe, bringing forgetfulness of all the past, and sending out the souls of men upon the other side as if that were the first beginning of their history. But no, take the new Christian and ask him what it means; and all the absorbing interest and hope of his story rests on this: "See what a life I have lived! I have neglected Christ; I have been selfish. I have done my will and not His; I have not even thought about Him all the time; and yet see, He has been loving me all these years. He never has forgotten me. He has been loving me and helping from the beginning. My eyes have just been opened. I have just found it out. Henceforth that late-discovered love will be the power of my life. It will lead me forward into other ways than those in which I have been walking." And so, as the host of the Israelites stopped by the Jordan’s bank before they crossed, until the old ark of the desert had swept through their ranks and taken its true place at their head, the believer’s new conviction and hope waits on the brink of the new life till the mercies of the past have swept on to the front, and stand ready to lead into the yet untrodden fields of God.

Such be the new life when it comes to you, my friends! From childhood God has loved you, God has kept you. When you are moved to give yourself to God, let there come out of all that love and keeping one large, strong, deep assurance of God’s love. On that love cast yourself and beg forgiveness, and then go forward under its assurance, giving yourself always more and more completely to a God who does not need to give Himself to you because He has been always yours.

All this does not apply only to the one critical experience of the spiritual life which we call conversion; it is true of all spiritual progress. Never let your Christian life disown its past. Let every new and higher consecration and enjoyment into which you enter be made real to you by bringing into it all that Christ has already trained within you of grace and knowledge. I do not like to hear a Christian say of some great enlightenment of his life, "I never knew what Christ was till then. All my Christian life before that was worthless, and goes for nothing. "There are Christians who are fond of saying such things. Their experiences are all spasmodic, full of jerks and starts. The probability is that God led you up to that enlightenment by all that went before. You never could have apprehended that truth or seen that glory of which you make so much, if first He had not led you through the dark and quiet places which you now despise. To the soul which dares believe the vast and precious truth of God’s personal love, all life becomes significant, and no past is so dreary that out of it there will not come up some ark of God to lead us to the richer things beyond.

I pass to one more application of our principle on which I must not dwell at length. It concerns our thoughts about the new life which awaits the soul in heaven. We think of the strangeness of that life into which they pass who have done with all the old familiar things of earth. Once, only once, for every man it comes. No feet pass twice down that dim avenue which we call death; so that for every one who passes there, all that he sees is strange and new. This is the wonder, the impressiveness of death, I think. The common road grows tame because the feet have trodden it a hundred times, and the eyes have grown familiar with its scenery until it has ceased to be noted any longer. I think that any road anywhere on the earth over which all men on earth passed once, and through which no man on earth might pass twice, would become solemn and awful to the thoughts of men. So it is of death and all that lies beyond. "We have not passed this way heretofore," men are saying to themselves as they begin to feel their path slope downward to the grave. It is that consciousness which we see coming in their faces when they know that they must die. And beyond death lies the unknown world. "No man hath seen God at any time," said Jesus; but there the power of the new life is to be that "we shall see Him as He is." It is our privilege to dwell upon the untold, unguessed glory of the world that is to come. It is a poor economy of spiritual motive which tries to make heaven real by taking out of it all thought of inexpressible and new delight, and bringing it down to the tame repetition of the scenes and ways of earth. But no man listens to the talk or reads the books which are often popular, about heaven, without feeling that the glory and delight of which they speak are far too completely separated in kind from any which this world’s experience has taught us how to value. It ought not to be so. The highest, truest thought of heaven which man can have is of the full completion of those processes whose beginning he has witnessed here, their completion into degrees of perfectness as yet inconceivable, but still one in kind with what he is aware of now.

Having this thought of heaven, all the deepest life of this world is leading the man toward it. When he goes in there at last, it will be his old life with God that leads him. It will be his long desire to see God which at last introduces him to the sight of God. It will be his long struggle with sin which finally prepares him for the world where he can never sin. Let this be the glory that gathers around your daily experiences, my Christian friends. Poor, weak, homely, commonplace as they may be, they are preparing you for something far greater and more perfect than themselves. Be true in them, learn them down to their depths and they shall open heaven to you some day. The powers and affection which are training in your family, your business, and your church are to find their eternal occupation along the streets of gold. "Well done, good and faithful servant, thou hast been faithful over a few things. I will make thee ruler over many things. Enter thou into the glory of thy Lord. "And so the long life of heaven shall be bound to the short life of earth forever.

It is good then for a man to come to a future which he does not know. It is good for you if God brings you to the borders of some promised land. Do not hesitate at any experience because of its novelty. Do not draw back from any way because you never have passed there before. The truth, the task, the joy, the suffering on whose border you are standing, oh, my friend, to-day, go into it without a fear; only, go into it with God, — the God who has been always with you. Let the past give up to you all the assurance of Him which it contains. Set that assurance of Him before you. Follow that, and the new life to which it leads you shall open its best richness to you; for he who most humbly owns what God has given him and taught him already is surest of the best and deepest blessings and teachings which God has yet to give.