THE TYRANNY OF THE PAST
W. John Murray
The Astor
Lectures
Divine Science Publishing Assoc.
New York, 1917, 8th ed.
“That which has been is now,
and that which is to be hath already
been; and God requireth that which is
past.”
-- Ecclesiastes 3:15.
[290]
TRADITIONS and customs, conceived,
conceived in the minds of antediluvian
ancestors, seem to have exercised a power
over the race, despite all its
progressive unfoldment. Modern we are,
yet woefully primitive in some of the
most important aspects of life. We
outlive one superstition only to enter
into another equally absurd. We revere
what is ancient, whether it be true or
not, and we look askance at that which is
new in much the same way.
A new
religion, a new science, a new
philosophy, are all regarded with
superstitious awe. We may not be
perfectly satisfied with the old, but we
are so bound by the iron rings of custom
that when the new is presented to us, we
hesitate to investigate it, much less
accept it. We rarely try the new by
comparison with Truth, but always by some
theology. Thus it is that we stand on the
threshold of a higher revelation, only to
turn back to some tradition of the past,
with which this larger vision does not
coincide. The tyranny of the past is that
it wears a ditch [291] in the brain, into
which all new thoughts tumble, and are
carried away before we take time to
assimilate or digest them. The torrents
of tradition are like those torrents of
the mountains which cut deep furrows in
the hillsides, and create rivers to the
valleys, on the breast of which twigs,
branches and trees are carried ruthlessly
away.
We accept
the decrees of the ancients, whether they
be right or wrong. We burn a supposed
witch because Moses said that they should
be put to death. We never realize how
much the race is the victim of the
tyranny of the past, until we begin to
analyze some of the prevailing customs
that have come down to us from the
earliest centuries. Consider, for
instance, the custom of capital
punishment which exists in many of our
states today, and with which some of the
brightest minds in the legal, social and
religious worlds are in sympathy. We call
this a Christian country, but is this a
Christian custom? Has the state more
right to kill than the individual, that a
custom so barbarous should persist,
despite the fact that the Founder of
Christianity denounced it? “Ye have
heard it said by them of old time, an eye
for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, and
by whomsoever man’s blood is shed,
by man shall his blood be shed also,
but I say not so.” (Matt.
5)
For
thousands of years before the advent of
Jesus this custom has prevailed and had
been accepted as a national law, from
which none [292] seemed to dissent. Now,
if we believe in Jesus at all, we must
know that he regarded this time-worn
custom as one “more honored in the
breach than in the observance.” Yet
here today, we find our Anti-Capital
Punishment Society struggling for the
abolishing of a custom which has no
higher justification for its continuance
than its antiquity. Two thousand years of
so-called Christianity have failed to
abolish this particular tyranny of the
past.
The tyranny
of the past in man’s attitude
towards woman has not yet become wholly
eradicated, for we still find traces of
the idea of ownership and domination by
force. Two thousand years ago Paul the
Apostle said, “Let your women keep
silent in the churches, for it is not
permitted unto them to speak, but they
are commanded to be under obedience, as
under the law.” (I Cor. 14:34.) By
law we are to understand that it was
custom--a tyranny of the past--which
subjected women to an enforced silence to
their husbands opinion. This senseless
custom has extended itself down to the
present day, so that we find ourselves
questioning the place of women on the
platform and in the pulpit,
notwithstanding the fact that we accord
to them more spirituality than is
generally accorded to men.
“Not she with trait’rous
kiss her Saviour stung,
Not she denied him with unholy
tongue;
She, while apostles shrank, could
danger brave,
Last at his cross, and earliest at his
grave.”
[293] Whence
this tyranny of the past? Why its
continuance? Was it man’s law or
Divine Love which bade women be silent in
the church?
As man has
been so imbued with the sense of
superiority that sex inequality has
become an accepted fact, even among the
women themselves, in some strange way the
belief in caste has been handed down to
us. Society has become divided on
artificial grounds;--such as heredity,
wealth, and the divine right of kings.
One man may dominate a million. The pride
and prejudice of the enlightened, which
leads to class distinction and a loss of
interest in the poor and ignorant, is
called unchristian, but it is only
another evidence of the tyranny of the
past.
Class
distinction, like every other error of
the human mind, began in a small way. A
few felt themselves superior to the many
and the unthinking majority, through
self-hypnosis, accepted a bondage which
was never imposed upon them by God. That
which began in the minds of the few, in
process of time became a subconscious
impression with the many. Thus it is that
we find patrician and plebeian, prince and
pauper. So deeply rooted is this tyranny
of the past that there are those who dare
assert it to be a dispensation of
Providence. Such an opinion receives a
merited rebuke from Milton, where he says
in Paradise Lost:
[294]
“O execrable son! so to
aspire
Above his brethren, to himself
assuming
Authority usurp’d, from God not
given.
He gave us only over beast, fish,
fowl,
Dominion absolute; that right we
hold
By his donation; but man over men
He made not lord; such title to
Himself
Reserving, human left from human
free.”
The
tyrannies of the past seem to be
numberless. The ones which affect society
as a whole are the more easily perceived
by reason of their bigness, but there are
those tyrannies of the past which affect
individuals, and which we do not always
recognize. We see a man who starts life
on this planet as an apparently healthy
baby, who grows to youth and early
manhood, when suddenly he manifests a
tendency in the direction of physical
malady of a moral weakness. He knows
nothing of the secret lives of his
parents, nothing of the conditions prior
to his conception and birth, and is
ignorant of the so-called Law of
Heredity. In ignorance of his divine
birthright, he is subject to race belief,
for error exercises an influence over us
until we “know the Truth”
about it. To a great extent, he is the
victim of the tyranny of the past in his
parents lives; for while it is not
God’s Law that a man should suffer
because of the sins of his parents, it is
an accepted belief on the part of the
majority, and until he realizes the
superiority of spiritual understanding
over human ignorance, he is more [295] or
less at the mercy of this human
ignorance. Every day we see the evil of
this particular form of tyranny, and we
know that there is no remedy for it save
in the knowledge that “One is our
Father, even God.” The belief that
man is the father of man “makes
thousands mourn” the day they were
born to an inheritance corrupt and
corroding, morally and physically. But
the days of our mourning are ended when
we become conscious of the Truth of our
Being, and learn that we are born
“not of blood, nor of the will of
the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of
God.” The tyranny of the past, with
all its painful consequences due to the
false belief in human or fleshly
inheritance, disappears before the light
of that Truth which says, “Beloved,
now are we the children of
God.” Man, conscious of his Divine
Sonship, throws off the shackles of
superstition, and enters into the
enjoyment of “The glorious liberty
of the Sons of God.”
We have
traced the tyrannies of the past from our
remote to our immediate ancestors, yet
there must be some references made to
those tyrannies which are more directly
connected with ourselves. When David the
Psalmist, going over his past life, cried
in the agonies of his soul,
“Remember not the sins of my
youth,” he gave some hint of the
tyranny of the past in the life of every
man that is born into the world. Who has
lived and loved who has not felt the
sharp sting of remorse? Who is there who,
in the silent watches of the night, has
not recalled his past mistakes, and
wished words unsaid and deeds undone, to
the end that he might have peace and
enjoy that “Peace that knits up the
ravell’d sleeve of care”? How
many lives have been ruined and what
prospects blighted through vain
regret?
Years ago we
sinned, and life has never been the same
to us since. The tyranny of the past is
that it robs the present of its highest
uses, and the future of its brightest
prospects. Yesterday we sinned, and today
we cannot pray. Self-condemnation is
making self-recognition impossible.
Unhealthy remorse is not real contrition,
for it bows the head in the dust when it
should be upraised to Deity in silent
recognition of a Force that is stronger
than sin, and which will one day prove
its superiority. “Shall we not
sorrow for our sins?” asks one.
Certainly we shall, but let our sorrow be
of the character that will make for
sin’s discontinuance. The sincerest
act of contrition is reformation; but
there can be no reformation if we merely
supplant a positive vice with the
negative virtue of self-disparagement,
and cry “Woe is me.”
God does not
wish us to expiate our offenses by
wallowing in the mire of past memories.
It is His will that we should arise from
the dust and go in the direction of the
thing we desire to be. Yesterday we
resolved to guard our thoughts against
evil and error; today we have made
another frightful mistake. What hope is
there for one who so soon tumbles from
the height of a good resolution?
Shakespeare says, “What’s
[297] gone and what’s past help,
should be past grief.” If the just
man falls seven times a day, it is not
because he stays down the first time; it
is because he picks himself up after each
fall. This is not an argument in favor of
sinning and justifying one’s self.
It is merely a suggestion to rise again,
no matter how often one falls, nor how
soon after he has resolved never to fall
again.
Today our
hearts are heavy because of something
which happened yesterday. We cannot put
out of our mind the thing which our heart
condemns. We have tried to pray, and each
time our unworthiness has made itself so
sensibly felt that we have given up in
despair. The mistake of yesterday is like
a huge barrier before today’s
possibilities. We may take some comfort
from the fact that we are sincere in our
repentance, since we have shed tears only
in the privacy of our own rooms, but let
us not be like those who are so occupied
with the remembrances of their own sins
that they have no consideration for the
sorrows of others. Whatever interferes
with present usefulness and future
improvement is a sin, and an evidence of
the tyranny of the past which can never
be recalled. No matter what our past has
been, no matter how grievous nor how
recent our mistakes, let us leave that
past behind us, as Joseph left his coat
in the hands of Potiphar’s
wife.
The past is
an encumbrance ever, as the future is a
myth. Therefore, we should be too busy
with the well-filled hour to look
backward or forward. [298] Sufficient for
the day is the experience thereof, and if
we would make it a profitable day,
spiritual and otherwise, we must remember
that “now is the accepted
time”--not yesterday or tomorrow.
As we cannot feel the weight of any
misery one moment before it arrives, let
us not drag the clanking chains of
yesterday’s sins into today’s
activities. They are excess baggage to
him who would climb the Alps of
self-conquest. A new day has come, and
with it new strength from the Source of
all strength. Let our repentance be shown
in careful watching and steady growth.
The tyranny of the past is tyrannous only
to him who, like Lot’s wife, looks
back upon it. Today is big with
opportunities. Live in it, pray in it,
and it shall yield rich harvest.
Next: God, our
Supply
* * * * *
The Astor Lectures
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(Formerly at
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