A HAPPY NEW YEAR

Evening Star, Issue 20990, 2 January 1932, Page 2

A HAPPY NEW YEAR

* That is what wo have all been wishing each other these last few days. It is a glib phrase, and on the lips of many means little or nothing. Let us put the emphasis on one word in it—the word new—and sec where it might lead us. « * * *• New: Chronologically, on paper, 1932 is new, but otherwise it is hoary with age. Things go on just as they have been , doing, There is no change in their outward aspect. The earth has whirled round in a circle and back to the place from whence it set out. So the ancients conceived it. In that unique specimen of Jewish literature — Ecclesiastes —so ancient yet so modern, the writer puts it into great impressiveness. To him it is not the newness of life, but it is monotony that affects him most. He can, in fact, discover newness nowhere. He looks out on Nature, and he is impressed with its changelessness. The sun rises, runs its course, disappears only , to reappear again in a few hours—so day and night succeed each other in unvarying procession. The winds seem fickle, yet they run round in a circle, and so on evermore. The rivers ebb and flow, empty themselves into the sea, and yet both rivers and sea change not. The rivers return to the place from whence they' started,' and the sea keeps its steadfast uniformity, restlessly hungering for calm, and never attaining it. There is nothing new, only the same old .procession of Nature from generation to generation. And then he turns to the contrast of this in man. Nature comes back with all her old forms and forces. ,

But man forsakes this earthly scene, Ah, never to return. Gan any following spring revive The ashes of his urn?

No, lie goes lienee, and time wipes out the memorials of him, buries them in the dust of tho ages. There is nothing new under the sun.

This is a mood that takes us all at times. We are oppressed by the monotony of things, of life, of work. With us, indeed, this is felt more keenly. For we know, as the ancients did not know, how universal is the uniformity of Nature; how changeless and far-reaching is the reign of law; how vast and steadfast are the forces that hold together the universe. And then over against this monotonous uniformity of the universe stands the transitoriness of man.

What is this passing life ? A peevish, April day, A little sun, a little rain, And then night creeps across the plain And all things fade away. It is. remarkable to notice the popularity of the old Persian poet Omar Khayyam in our age. Next to the. Bible or the •* Pilgrim’s Progress ’ it is perhaps' the best seller of our time. We know with what subtle sweet music he sings the nothingness of life and the need of filling up its blanks with, what pleasure we can catch. When you and I behind the veil are passed, Oh 1 but the long, long time the world shall last, Which of our coming and departure heeds, As the sea’s self should heed, a pebble cast. In her .* Makers of Florence ’ Mrs Oliphant paints an impressive picture of the last meeting of Savonarola and the great Lorenzo de Medici. The latter is in the remorseless grip of the Last Enemy. And as the famous Florentine prophet leaves the chamber she writes: “ Life with the one, death with the other, and this great Nature calm and fair, this long-lived everlasting earth to which men great and mean are but things of a moment encircling both.” Sentiments of that sort abound in the pages of our modern litterateurs. We take just one illustration. Lucas Malet, who died the other, week, to whom we referred recently, has a pathetic passage in one of her books, ‘Colonel Enderby’s Wife.’ She is describing the death of her hero, out on his lawn, in the frosty morning. He had been a devout worshipper of Nature. But Nature pays no heed to his passing. Everything goes on just as usual. Tho stars come out, the frost creeps up over the lawn, tho river glides on. The owls slide through the sable darkness as if nothing had happened. “Is it a thought of strong consolation, or of terror, that tho fate of each one of us matters so little; that the great world rolls on serene and unfailing, as careless of the birth' or death of her human children as of the gnat that flickers for one brief hour above the swaying reed beds, or of tho hoar frost that vanishes into nothingness at the first kiss of the morning sun? ” So as we look back upon the year, and the years, we find ourselves in sympathy with the old Jewish diarist: “ The thing which hath been is that which shall bo; and that which is done is that which shall be done, and there is no new thing under the sun.”

* * # * Yet we continue to wish each other a good now year. When we put the emphasis on the word “ new ” we have our doubts whether it will be that either for our friends or ourselves. 1' or everything in Nature and the world seems to conspire against it. What is it that would make the year new for us? Wo would not get it by escaping from the old, by going abroad and seeing different things. Emerson tells us that he did that, but he found the old Emerson in the midst of all the new things. What then ? Here is a mirror, 0.g., to adapt an illustration all the better because it happens not to be our own. It has got good reflecting glass. It reveals everything perfectly that is in the room. If we want it to reveal different things wo must ‘change—what? Clearly not the mirror, but the furnishings of the room. It is no use changing the glass or polishing it so long as the room remains the same. Here is a man’s life. It has grown arid, old, monotonous. “Oh! that weary river,” said a celebrated nobleman to Wilbcrforcc as they stood on the balcony of his villa

and looked down upon the Thames from Richmond Hill. “There it runs on from day to day, and I so weary of it all.” What is needed to alter this mood? To go abroad and see all sights from Pole to Pole? That will not do it—at least, permanently. That is changing tho glass of tho mirror without changing the furniture of the room. It is trying to find new things outside him. The trouble is not at all there. It is within him. Reverse the process. Instead of altering tho glass in tho mirror or polishing it you alter the furniture of tho room; in other words, instead of altering a man’s surroundings you alter tho man himself, then you alter everything outside him. Change the man and you Oliange tho world. Tho world is what we make it. Wo get back nothing but what we take. The great man finds a great world, the little man a little world, the mean man a mean world, the withered man an old and wearied world.

That much is perfectly clear at least. Rut just there emerges the difficulty. And as we get older it is ever increasing with the years. As wo get older so do things. Habits are formed and rule us. And with multitudes “ life gets to bo an insufferable burden, a dreary round, a wretched repetition; and we see backs bent with nothing but pure sorrow, and heads white with none other sickness than vexation of spirit, and men brought to the grave because life was too wearisome and time too intolerable, and existence too aimless and stale to be supported any longer.” Is there any way of escape from such a commonplace and common condition? Wo have just been celebrating Christmas. Is not that what its Pounder came, not to proclaim—there was no need to do that —but to make possible and real? It was to a Doctor of Laws He said: “Ye must be born again.” There was nothing new in that. If Christianity had said nothing more than that it would only have-survived as a more or less notable incident in human development, like other historical religions. Christendom would not have been celebrating it a few days ago. What then? This: It supplies the dynamic by which the possible and needful become actual. This is the original factor in that faith. Tho experience of twenty centuries of men and women in every rank of life and every stage of culture testifies to it. Read the powerful elemental poem of our present Laureate, ‘ Saul.’ It tells how this wild, reckless, boxing, drunken fellow was transformed in a moment, as it were:

1 dill not think, 1 did not strive, The deep peace burnt my soul alive; The bolted sloor hud broken in— I'knew that 1 had done with sin.

“ Old things had passed away. Behold! all things had become new.” The words and the name recall the Saul of an earlier day—a man of a wholly different stamp, clean living, cultured, law-abiding. Yet he, too, felt the need of this new birth and experienced it. It is to him we owe the saying just quoted. But the quotation as usually given quite obscures the real meaning, it should be more accurately rendered: “ Old things are passed away. Behold! they are become new.” In other words, it is. not an obliteration of things past, but a transfiguration of them. The old not wiped out as with a wet sponge you wipe clean a slate. It remains, but it is seen and felt in a newer, truer, more attractive light. “God, if this were faith!” says Stevenson, in an emotional outburst in one of his finest poems. But it is more than faith. It is faith verified and illumined by experience. It was an actual veritable thing for these two men. And between the Saul of the first century and the Saul of the twentieth there rises up a great cloud of witnesses bearing a similar testimony. True it is they did not all pass in a moment, as it were, from the old to the new. But they achieved it, nevertheless. It seems incredible. But the scientific spirit insists that we adjust theories to facts, not facts to theories. Copernicus created a revolution in science by simply changing the point of view from earth to heaven. The earth, said Copernicus, is not the centre of tho universe. It is the sun, and though you cannot plant your observatory there you can get there mentally. Thus the old heavens and earth were transformed, and the world entered into a new era. It is quite likely if many of us were to make a similar change in our point of view we and they migut achieve what we are all desiring for each other— A Happy New Year.