‘If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us!’ Coleridge had no time for platitudes, as this quotation indicates. But he has learned what we all learn in due course that hindsight is a wonderful thing. We can see what was inevitable when we have to live with the consequences.
His fellow-poet saw the other side of the coin. Wordsworth called it a stern duty, the daughter of the voice of God. We do our duty, trusting the God who gave it to us. At the time we peered through the murk and found that the future is not given to us; it is withheld.
Particularly during our younger days we find this irksome. We need to know God’s will for us and we needto know for sure. But – and I have said this before – the Lord’s Prayer does not encourage us to look for the will of God, given to us like a commission, plain as a a pikestaff. It is true that in times of turmoil God chooses a person (rather than a committee) and gives him or her a job to do. But that job is not defined in all particulars with terms, conditions and pension provided in complete detail. Often the job involves breaking new ground using as Kipling said, worn-out tools and sorting out a muddle.
The Lord’s Prayer looks at our duty in terms of ‘Thy will be done’. Doing that will is more important than knowing what that will is. We have in the Ten Commandments and the imaginative goodness in the Sermon on the Mount ample guidance of what our duty is and how we should see life in that context.
Does that mean we have to spend our time looking back? Never. But if we lose a sense of history we find ourselves repeating it. That was what happened at Masada. The synagogue replaced the Temple. Judaism and Christianity became free as worldwide faiths.
GOD GAVE THE JOB TO MOSES
When the Lord spoke to Moses in Egypt, he said, ‘I am the Lord. Report to Pharaoh King of Egypt all that I say to you.’ (Exodus 6.28,29).
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