---

It was the impressiveness of a new experience. A ship's company who have lived together for a few weeks, growing accustomed to their shipboard life, at last draw near the land towards 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. Let us look to-day at this power of unprecedented things, and try to get some idea of the true way to approach them. Apply it first of all to the changes which are coming all the time in the circumstances of our lives. If you go and stand in the midst of London, or climb to the top of the pyramids, or set your self in the middle of a snowfield 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. 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. Oh, when any of the changes of life draws near to you, whenever God is leading you into new circumstances, clasp with new fervour 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. A young man's life is full of novelty. 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? 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. The faith which is shaping for his manhood evidently is to not 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. 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 some day. This is the meaning of a boy's or a young man's confirmation. 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 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. If you want to make a man a Christian, how shall you begin? 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." 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. 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. 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. 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. "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." 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 towards 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. The powers and affections which are training in your family, your business, and your Church, are to find their eternal occupation along the streets of gold. And so the long life of heaven shall be bound to the short life of earth for ever.

(Bp. Phillips Brooks.)

---

---

KJV: And it came to pass after three days, that the officers went through the host;

WEB: It happened after three days, that the officers went through the midst of the camp;