to it with excited expectation, as pregnant with great events to the whole of Christendom. It is evident at least that our association of churches never stood in more need, than they are likely to do in the not distant future, of some common medium for the interchange of views; some common vehicle for the ready conveyance, to the several congregations of the body, of suggestions, warnings, and counsels suited to the times; some common instrumentality by which we may vindicate our principles, and lift up in the view of the world and of other churches the special testimony for the truth of God entrusted to us. Perilous times are at hand. Our prayer is, that we may be found equal to the exigencies of the crisis and the demands of the age.

EDINBURGH, November 25, 1865.

THE

UNITED PRESBYTERIAN MAGAZINE.

JANUARY 1865.

Miscellaneous Communications.

PAST AND PRESENT: A NEW YEAR'S HOMILY.

BY THE REV. JAMES RENNIE, DALKEITH.

'Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not inquire wisely concerning this.'-ECCLES. vii. 10.

Ir is interesting to note how closely man resembles man, from generation to generation. Notwithstanding numerous features of dissimilarity occasioned by race, climate, country, religion, education, and mode of life, the agreement underlying these, and binding man to man through all ages and all the world over, is both broad and deep. Nor is this agreement confined to the specific and essential characteristics of our common humanity-to those faculties and endowments which distinguish man from the lower animals, such as the powers of reason, reflection, and speech. It may be traced in many of the results of the exercise of those powers-in likeness of thought, and feeling, and action. How common, for example, among ourselves is the tendency to overrate the past, and to underrate the present! What a glow of golden sunlight rests on the treasures of memory, causing us at times to look upon them, and speak of them, as if they belonged to some brighter and better world! Have you ever listened to the old man eloquent' as he spoke of the days of his youth? How he revels in the memories of the good old times! How long and sunny were the summers-how snell and bracing the winters -how snug and cheery the firesides-how warm and genuine the friendships -how easy and unsophisticated the manners-how stalwart and lithe 'our sons'-how blooming and blithe 'our daughters '-how staid and prudent the matrons-how sagacious and venerable the grey-haired sires, in the days when he was a boy! And there are some of us, on whom time has as yet left no very deep furrows, who are verging round to the belief that surely summer days were longer, and summer skies brighter, and summer winds balmier, and summer fruits juicier, long ago! Though, as thus we muse, it may not occur to us that three thousand years ago men mused, and felt, and spoke about the past, much as we do now; and that, after all, the change over which, in half-melancholy mood, we can scarce refrain heaving a sigh, is more a change in ourselves, than in the times and the objects we set in contrast. There were men and women in King Solomon's day-so the text discloses—who, under the influence of feelings similar to those I have been describing, put the question, What is the cause that the former days were better than these?'

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NO. I., VOL. IX., NEW SERIES.-JANUARY 1865.

A

Now, so long as this love of the past vents itself merely in old men's musings, or in warm-tinted stories which enliven the domestic hearth of a winter night, no very serious exception need be taken to it. In truth, we frankly confess to a somewhat inordinate relish for the thing so served up. But when it assumes the form of systematic and grumbling depreciation of the present, and of gloomy and disheartening forecastings of the future: when it would have us believe that the world is going backward instead of forward; that mankind, as a whole, are becoming worse, not better; that human life on earth is neither so good nor so desirable as it once was; that, in short, we are progressing in the wrong direction-have left behind us a golden age, are in the midst of a brazen one, and will shortly be in the fetters of one of iron;—then our attitude is at once that of emphatic protesta protest which finds most fitting expression in the words of the wise king: Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not inquire wisely concerning this.'

To check somewhat the tendency to exalt the past at the expense of the present, a tendency which at times most men feel; to induce and strengthen the conviction that the world is making progress, many things apparently to the contrary notwithstanding; to quicken the faith of Christians in a glorious future for this earth of ours; and to stimulate and cheer those who are labouring to leave this world better, in some respects, than they found it ;such is the intention at least of our New Year's Homily.

Our text contains a dissuasive advice. It guards us against speaking unadvisedly with our lips respecting the past and the present; and quietly hints, that in asking what is the cause that the former days were better than these, we are foolishly in search of a cause for something which does not exist, and troubling ourselves about a reason for a state of matters which has no foundation, save in our own ignorance and error. There is a spice of sarcasm, we think, in these words of the royal sage. As if he had said to the grumblers of his day, 'Have you made sure of your facts, friends, before troubling yourselves in this manner about their causes? What if there be no effects such as you allege: can there in that case be any causes such as you seek?' Sound philosophy this, and as sound advice. And it may be as well for us to take the wise man's hint, and before trying to answer the question, What is the cause that the former days were better than these?' to deal with the previous question, Were the former days better than these?' And we may perhaps satisfactorily dispose of both questions by advancing-first, Some reasons why the former days should not be better than these; and, secondly, Some facts which show that the former days were not better than these.

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I. SOME REASONS WHY THE FORMER DAYS SHOULD NOT BE BETTER THAN And here, in the fore-front, we place the constitution and powers of

THESE.

man himself.

It has been aptly remarked, that birds build their nests now just as they did before the flood. For instinct, marvellous as it is in many of its manifestations, is essentially uniform and stationary. It never, either in the individual or in the species, rises from lower, through successive stages, to higher efforts and achievements. The first nest of a yearling bird is as well built, and built after the same fashion and with the same materials, as the last. The same thing is seen in the song of birds. Rich and full and free though in many cases it is, it never varies beyond certain well-defined limits, so that when warbling apparently in the profuse luxuriance of an

extemporized and exhaustless melody, the thrush and the lark are but repeating the notes which belong respectively to their kind. And so it is, more or less decidedly, with the acts and habits of all the inferior animals. But it is very different with man. He is a rational creature, endowed with the power to think, to reason, to compare, to experiment, to infer, to calculate, to correct, to modify, to choose; in virtue of which, though liable to fall into mistakes and blunders in a way and to an extent unknown to instinct, he is nevertheless able to rise to heights of attainment in every line of effort, of which no earthly creature of God save himself is capable.

Add to this,

man's faculty to teach and to learn, the power to make the knowledge and acquirements of one the possession of the many, the wondrous gift of memory, and, above all, the restless, quenchless thirst of the human soul after the unreached—the consuming desire to bring to light the secrets of the unknown, and you have the broadest and strongest premises possible from which to draw the inference that man's career must be one of progress, and therefore that the former days should not be better than these.' Then observe, that no gulf of separation divides one generation of men from another, rendering the stores of information and experience amassed by one unavailable and valueless to the other. On the contrary, the flow of a river is not more continuous than is the onflow of the generations of men on the . face of the earth. Consequently, the treasures of one age become the inheri-. tance of its successors. Facts, maxims, counsels, warnings, experiments, speculations, achievements, failures,-all that tends to consolidate and extend and advance the hard-won, priceless trophies of human experience, is transmitted from sire to son, and from age to age. Not that everything, or even everything valuable, is thus floated down from the past. Much, we know, has sunk, and been lost apparently for ever. As, for instance (not to speak of higher matters), the means and appliances whereby Egyptian engineers quarried and conveyed that stupendous block of solid granite from which Egyptian sculptors cut out the colossal statue of Rameses, which in its ruin is to this day the eclipsing wonder of the many wonders of the once famous Thebes. But while this is so, and while such ruins as those of Thebes and Baalbek should teach us to be guarded and discriminating in our language when asserting the superiority of the present over the past, yet it is undoubtedly the case that each generation receives a precious legacy of truth, fact, and experience from its predecessor; so that unless some awful fatality cleaves to the human race,-unless mankind have been doomed, like Sisyphus in ancient fable, to roll uphill an ever-rebounding stone,-unless all the physical, intellectual, and moral energies of men are expended as uselessly as is the felon's strength in the modern treadmill,-then man's state must on the whole be one of progress, and the former days should not be better than these.

Another reason we advance to show that the former days should not be better than these, is drawn from the character and government of God.

On the supposition that there is a God, and that He reigns in the earth,— that is, granting two of the primary truths of natural religion,-it is next to impossible to believe that man, God's chief work on earth, is destined to go through the same endless routine from age to age, gaining nothing, improving in nothing, advancing in nothing; but rather perhaps losing, and retrograding, and drifting farther and farther from the realization of what has been the conviction, the hope, the wish, or the dream of human spirits since time began, that not only individual men, but the race as a whole, are the victims of a tantalizing expectation which will not die within them, but which

seems to have the strange and terrible power of living on its own disappointments. Surely there must be not only plausible, but absolutely unchallengeable and overwhelming reasons in its favour, to drive any man to a creed so cheerless and dismal as this. And yet this is just the creed they would have men adopt, who, generation after generation, from Solomon's time to our own, have been alleging that the former days were better than these.' For we need scarcely say, that if the eighteenth century was better than the present, and the seventeenth century again better than the eighteenth, and so on, the conclusion is inevitable—that mankind, instead of rising age after age to loftier and still loftier heights, is gradually sinking into deeper and still deeper depths. I must give up my faith in God before I can believe this. And, after all, faith in the onward and upward progress of humanity resolves itself into faith in God. However crude and godless many of the speculations and conclusions of modern science may be, there seems to be sufficient foundation for the belief, that our earth has reached its present condition by great progressive steps-that advancement from lower to higher platforms of being has marked its past history with all the certainty and uniformity of an universal law. Is it then an undue straining of analogy,is it not rather a reasonable and appropriate homage to the beneficent purposes and power of the great Creator and Ruler of all,-to infer that, under the same divine hand, mankind in its successive generations is approximating a better and more blissful state than it has hitherto attained—a state at once more human and more Godlike?

This leads us to advance a third reason why the former days should not be better than these. It is drawn from the matter and mode of divine revelation.

On looking into the Word of God we find it all a-glow with promises and hopes of a millennial day-a golden age for this world, yet future. With unfaltering and eloquent tongue it speaks of glorious things to come, and portrays, in bold and brilliant outline, the elements of which this coming glory shall principally consist. We need only refer to such passages as the following, which are strewn thick as starlight across the lofty firmament of prophecy :-' And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots: and the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon Him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord; and shall make Him of quick understanding in the fear of the Lord: and He shall not judge after the sight of His eyes, neither reprove after the hearing of His ears: but with righteousness shall He judge the poor, and reprove with equity for the meek of the earth: and He shall smite the earth with the rod of His mouth, and with the breath of His lips shall He slay the wicked. And righteousness shall be the girdle of His loins, and faithfulness the girdle of His reins. The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf, and the young lion, and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice' den. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.' (Isa. xi. 1-9.) Now, either this is baseless and inflated hyperbole, worse than meaningless-misguiding, and cruel, or there is a highway of glorious progress and a splendid destiny before mankind. Faith in the Bible as the