(Demonstrations in recent weeks have dramatized the effect the past has on the present. Our Wednesday posts for the next couple of weeks will address a couple of the issues that have spun off of those demonstrations. It’s appropriate, therefore, that we offer Dr. Crane’s thoughts on—)

THE PAST

A good deal of morbid nonsense has been said and written and thought about the Past.

The Past is irrevocable, we have been told in sermon and story—you cannot escape the past—the Past can never be changed—and so on, and so on—the whole trend of this thought being that the Past is a kind of Sherlock Holmes dogging our steps forever, a sinister nemesis waiting its chance to strike us down, the account-book of an angry God sure to confront us some day.

All of this is morbid, most of it is dramatic; the underlying sentiment of it is false, weakening, and septic.

As a matter of fact, our Past, as Maeterlinck* says, depends on our Present and changes with it.

What the Past is depends upon the way you are now using it. Its effect upon your destiny will be gauged by how you translate it into the Future.

If we brood over the Past, and weaken ourselves with vain regrets, with self-contempt and remorse, then it will poison and undo us.

But no matter what it contains of our sin or folly, we can, by a right use of it now, make it minister to our welfare.

First, we can learn wisdom from it. By it we can realize our faults to be corrected and our offenses to be atoned for. And with this wisdom we can go onto better things.

The only true repentance is so to use th Past as to enable us to build a better future. Weeping and wailing and brooding are the luxuries of morbidity.

The Past is beneath our feet. We can go down into it and wallow in impotent grief, or we can step upon it to higher things.

The great enemy of life is Despair. The great friend of life is Hope. Despair paralyzes, ruins. Hope energizes, “for we are saved by hope.”

Up! Face the future! Whatever the Past has been, let it nerve you to spend your remaining days unfaithfulness and loyalty to your better self!

So Tennyson, with clear insight, with sane instinct for moral truth, wrote:

“I hold it truth, with him (Goethe) who sings

To one clear harp in divers tones,

That men may rise in stepping stones

Of their dead selves to higher things.”

*Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1849) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1911 in recognition of his “many-sided literary activities.”