Not the Making But the Repeating, Is Your Danger

To live down the past and erase the errors, live boldly the present.

Do not chastise or condemn yourself for mistakes you have made; you are not alone; everyone has made missteps, has hurt others, has wronged himself.

Everyone has had trouble, reverses and misfortune; it's the plan of things, and these things come to give us experience and correct our future acts by the knowledge of how to avoid errors and wrongs.

Yesterday is dead; forget it. Face about; live today; be busy, be active, be intent on doing right and accomplishing things worth while.

The world's memory is short. A misdeed, an error, a wrongful act on your part may set busy tongues wagging today and you may suffer from calumny and criticism. Of course your errors will be magnified and your wrongs enlarged beyond the truth; that's the penalty you pay.

Lies are always added to truth in telling of one's misdeeds. Be brave; weather the storm, it will soon blow over. Tomorrow the world will forget.

You've suffered in your own conscience; that's all the debt you can pay on the old score.

Now, then, get busy with the glorious opportunity today presents. Don't make the same mistake again. There are no eyes in the back of your head; look forward.

Don't worry by envying the other fellow and comparing his good deeds with your mistakes; you only see his good. He has had troubles and made mistakes too, but you and the world have forgotten them.

If every man's sins were printed on their foreheads the crowds you pa.s.s would all wear their hats over their eyes.

I'm trying to comfort you, and slap you on the back and tell you you are just human and all humans make false steps.

The patriarchs in the Bible made mistakes, but they got in the fold.

History has perpetuated their names. Their lives on the whole were worth while. It's the sum total of acts that count.

TOMORROW

A Little a.n.a.lysis of Our Relation to Eternity

One man says the present is everything, the eternity is nothing.

The other man says eternity is everything, present is nothing.

I believe the real truth is, both are man's chief concern, and neither is all truth.

In this matter the general rule I have so often pointed out will harmoniously apply; that rule is, avoid extremes.

Those who believe that the now, the present, is the all important thing in man's life have the fashionable or favorite point of view.

Man definitely knows much about the present, he knows much about life.

He is in the midst of life--it pulsates all around him and in him.

We know positively that the law of compensation is inexorable in its demands for right and positive in its punishment of wrong.

We know that on this earth kindness, love, occupation, help, truth, honor and sympathy are investments which bring happiness today. You get your pay instantly when you have done a helpful act and you get your punishment instantly when you have done a hurtful act.

That there is a future most of us agree, because good sense and logic points to that sane and reasonable conclusion.

So be it, with a belief in the future estate, it is reasonable to a.s.sume that our acts and lives in the present estate will have influence on our future estate.

We know positively of today, and the happiness we can get from good deeds done today.

If we will have power in the future to look back to today's acts, well and good, if today's acts are worth while.

The other view that eternity is everything and the present is nothing is the antiquated view, the narrow view; the, I might say, illiterate view.

That view warps the present life; it calls for present self-chastis.e.m.e.nt, present gloom, present sorrow and present misery.

It takes the tangible definite today, calls it nothing, and accepts the intangible unknown eternity as everything.

It trades the definite for the indefinite. It calls life a bubble, a vapor, a shadow. In fact, it makes gloom on today's sunshine and puts its believers into a purgatory; a dismal unhappy punishment antechamber where man exists and waits peeping out of his cell windows for a little imagined view of eternity.

He waits and endures the unpleasant interval, steeled against definite pleasures and evident life of today, and worried into an intoxicated colored belief in the expected happiness of the undefined future.

He refuses to think of definite life of today and spoils the thought of those who do.

He is a blockade to progress, a disagreeable part of life's picture.

He gets no happiness in the today which is in his hands, he loses this opportunity during his definite existence, and lives on future hopes in a future state which no man today knows what it will be.

Both theories as ultimate beliefs are wrong, yet each has some truth in its conclusion.

By taking the words eternity and present and saying both means everything, we avoid extremes and form a truth that is rational, and harmonious to good reason.

The man who says present is all does so because he is an utilitarian. He acts on the definite and refuses to believe in the abstract. Anything that is outside the sphere of his vision and action is of little concern to him.

The man who says eternity is all, wastes opportunity, example and warps himself into a miserable hermit.

Life is irrevocable. Every act in our life is placed, set, and fixed.

Every act goes in the record book of yesterday and it cannot be changed.

Acts that hurt others will rebound and hurt us. Deeds that helped others will rebound and help us. This much is certain.

There is a future, I believe that. There is a G.o.d, I believe that.

Just what the future is, and just what G.o.d is, I do not know in perfect detail.

Reward for good and punishment for bad, is part of G.o.d's plan, and I am conscious of this truth.

I know that justice prevails in this life, and this life is what I am living now.