SOME believers live in the past, and they are men of the past. Once they lived in the present, and thought out the thoughts of the men living around them, and sought from God wisdom to help their day and generation. In that earlier time they were useful to their fellows, but, having become antiquarians, their present usefulness is comparatively small. Interesting and well-informed persons they are; they charm you with stories of fifty years ago, and with accounts of movements long since gone by; they can paint pictures of the past, till the pictures look so life-like, that the spectator can almost imagine himself living in the scenes depicted. They describe the grace and the holiness, the breathings after God, the love and the unity of the Christians, the triumphs of their faith in the days of ore, but the present, this very hour, with its infidelities, its retrograde spirit, its rebellion against God, is not that which inspires the soul of the antiquarian.
These Christians are like the curators attached to museums who show and explain to visitors the armor and the weapons of the dead, and point out how the soldiers now at rest won battles and overthrew the foe.
Antiquarianism is interesting, but for usefulness we need wisdom to discern the signs of the times. We are called to serve our day and generation; we are the living among the living, and should seek to enter into the difficulties of the hour, and to think out the thoughts of the men among whom we move.
Records of the past should encourage us to be zealous in the present; tales of the victories of old should fire us with eagerness for victories for today; the noble deeds and vigorous faith of saints now with Christ in paradise, should appeal to us to quit ourselves like men, and to be strong—strong in the Lord, and in the power of His might, this very day.
Older people are in danger of antiquarianism. The young, as a rule, object to antiquarianism. The knowledge of how men served God five hundred, or fifty years ago, rightly used, should be an example of how men should serve Him today. The question should be how shall victory be gained today over the evils and errors of the day. England may blazon Nile and Waterloo upon her standards, but did war break out tomorrow, England would have to fight fresh battles. Christians may boast of Luther, or of Whitfield, or of Wesley, or speak of the great men whom they knew, but they want to see men so living in God’s presence that their souls are stirred for God, and led into active warfare for Christ!
We would earnestly beg of our older readers to beware of becoming antiquarians. Let the older Christians use their experiences of God’s ways, and their knowledge of His word, yes, and of the good they have seen in His saints also, to help the young; let them seek to be living, moving, burning witnesses their own very selves for God, and for eternity. Or, if this cannot be, if our reader feels that he has grown too old and too stiff for use, we would ask him not to tell the young stories of what happened long years ago, in such a way as to lead them to suppose that God was more gracious in the past than He is in the present. This would certainly make the young in faith doubly disheartened—first by the effect of the story of a bright but long since faded past, and next by the sight of an antiquarian.