533. The Art of Forgetting

The Art of Forgetting

Heb_8:12 : ’93Their sins and their inquiries will I remember no more.’94

The national flower of the Egyptians is the heliotrope, of the Assyrians is the water-lily, of the Hindus is the marigold, of the Chinese is the chrysanthemum. We have no national flower, but there is hardly any flower more suggestive to many of us than the ’93forget-me-not.’94 We all like to be remembered, and one of our misfortunes is that there are so many things we cannot remember. Mnemonics, or the art of assisting memory, is an important art. It was first suggested by Simonides of Ceos five hundred years before Christ. Persons who had but little power to recall events, or put facts and names and dates in proper processions have, through this art, had their memory re-enforced to an almost incredible extent. A good memory is an invaluable possession. By all means, cultivate it. I had an aged friend, who, detained all night at a miserable depot in waiting for a rail-train fast in the snowbanks, entertained a group of some ten or fifteen clergymen, likewise detained on their way home from a meeting of Presbytery, by, first, with a piece of chalk, drawing out on the black and sooty walls of the depot, the characters of Walter Scott’92s ’93Marmion,’94 and then reciting from memory the whole of that poem of some eighty pages in fine print. My old friend through great age lost his memory, and when I asked him if this story of the railroad depot was true, he said: ’93I do not remember now, but it was just like me.’94 ’93Let me see,’94 said he to me, ’93have I ever seen you before?’94 ’93Yes,’94 I said, ’93you were my guest last night and I was with you an hour ago.’94 What an awful contrast in that man between the greatest memory I ever knew and no memory at all.

But right along with this art of recollection, which I cannot too highly eulogize, is one quite as important and yet I never heard it applauded. I mean the art of forgetting. There is a splendid faculty in that direction that we all need to cultivate. We might, through that process, be ten times happier and more useful than we now are. We have been told that forgetfulness is a weakness and ought to be avoided by all possible means. So far from a weakness, my text ascribes it to God. It is the very climax of Omnipotence that God is able to obliterate a part of his own memory. If we repent of sin and rightly seek the divine forgiveness, the record of the misbehavior is not only crossed off the books, but God actually lets it pass out of memory. ’93Their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more.’94 To remember no more is to forget, and you cannot make anything else out of it. God’92s power of forgetting is so great that if two men appeal to him, and the one man, after a life all right, gets the sins of his heart pardoned, and the other man, after a life of abomination, gets pardoned, God remembers no more against one than against the other. The entire past of both the moralist, with his imperfections, and the profligate, with his debaucheries, is as much obliterated in the one case as in the other. Forgotten, forever and forever. ’93Their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more.’94

This sublime attribute of forgetfulness on the part of God you and I need, in our finite way, to imitate. You will do well to cast out of your recollection all wrongs done you. During the course of one’92s life he is sure to be misrepresented, to be lied about, to be injured. There are those who keep these things fresh by frequent rehearsal. If things have appeared in print, they keep them in their scrap-book, for they cut these precious paragraphs out of newspapers or books and at leisure times look them over, or they have them tied up in bundles, or thrust in pigeon holes, and they frequently regale themselves and their friends by an inspection of these flings, these sarcasms, these falsehoods, these cruelties. I have known gentlemen who carried them in their pocketbooks, so that they could easily get at these irritations, and they put their right hand in the inside of the coat pocket over their heart, and say: ’93Look here! Let me show you something.’94 Scientists catch wasps and hornets and poisonous insects and transfix them in curiosity bureaus for study, and that is well. But these of whom I speak catch the wasps and the hornets and poisonous insects and play with them and put them on themselves and on their friends and see how far the noxious insects can jump and show how deep they can sting. Have no such scrap-book. Keep nothing in your possession that is disagreeable. Tear up the falsehoods and the slanders and the hypercriticisms. Imitate the Lord in my text and forget, actually forget, sublimely forget. There is no happiness for you in any other plan or procedure. You see all around you in the church and out of the church dispositions acerb, malign, cynical, pessimistic. Do you know how these men and women got that disposition? It was by the embalmment of things pantherine and viperous. They have spent much of their time in calling the roll of all the rats that have nibbled at their reputation. Their soul is a cage of vultures. Everything in them is sour or embittered. The milk of human kindness has been curdled. They do not believe in anybody or anything. If they see two people whispering, they think it is about themselves. If they see two people laughing, they think it is about themselves. Where there is one sweet pippin in their orchard, there are fifty crab apples. They have never been able to forget. They do not want to forget. They never will forget. Their wretchedness is supreme, for no one can be happy if he carries perpetually in mind the mean things that have been done him. On the other hand, you can find here and there a man or woman (for there are not many of them) whose disposition is genial and summery. Why? Have they always been treated well? Oh, no. Hard things have been said against them. They have been charged with officiousness; and their generosities have been set down to a desire for display, and they have many a time been the subject of tittle-tattle, and they have had enough small assaults like gnats and enough great attacks like lions to have made them perpetually miserable, if they would have consented to be miserable. But they have had enough divine philosophy to cast off the annoyances, and they have kept themselves in the sunlight of God’92s favor and have realized that these oppositions and hindrances are a part of a mighty discipline, by which they are to be prepared for usefulness and heaven. The secret of it all is, they have by the help of the Eternal God learned how to forget.

Another practical thought: When our faults are repented of let them go out of mind. If God forgets them, we have a right to forget them. Having once repented of our infelicities and misdemeanors, there is no need of our repenting of them again. Suppose I owe you a large sum of money, and you are persuaded I am incapacitated to pay, and you give me acquittal from that obligation. You say: ’93I cancel that debt. All is right now. Start again.’94 And the next day, I come in and say: ’93You know about that big debt I owed you. I have come in to get you to let me off. I feel so bad about it I cannot rest. Do let me off.’94 You reply with a little impatience: ’93I did let you off. Don’92t bother yourself and bother me with any more of that discussion.’94 The following day I come in and say: ’93My dear sir, about that debt. I can never get over the fact that I owed you that money. It is something that weighs on my mind like a millstone. Do forgive me that debt.’94 This time you clear lose your patience and say: ’93You are a nuisance. What do you mean by this reiteration of that affair? I am almost sorry I forgave you that debt. Do you doubt my veracity, or do you not understand the plain language in which I told you that debt was canceled?’94 Well, my friends, there are many Christians guilty of worse folly than that. While it is right that they repent of new sins and of recent sins, what is the use of bothering yourself and insulting God by asking him to forgive sins that long ago were forgiven? God has forgotten them. Why do you not forget them? No; you drag the load on with you and three hundred and sixty-five times a year, if you pray every day, you ask God to recall occurrences which he has not only forgiven but forgotten. Quit this folly. I do not ask you less to realize the turpitude of sin, but I ask you to a higher faith in the promise of God and the full deliverance of his mercy. He does not give a receipt for part payment, or so much received on account, but receipt in full, God having for Christ’92s sake decreed, ’93your sins and your iniquities will I remember no more.’94 As far as possible, let the disagreeables of life drop. We have enough things in the present and there will be enough in the future to disturb us without running a special train into the great Gone-By to fetch us as special freight things left behind. Some ten years ago, when there was a great railroad strike, I remember seeing all along the route from Omaha to Chicago and from Chicago to New York hundreds and thousands of freight cars switched on the side-tracks, those cars loaded with all kinds of perishable material, decaying and wasting. After the strike was over, did the railroad companies bring all that perished material down to the markets? No, they threw it off where it was destroyed, and loaded up with something else. Let the long train of your thoughts throw off the worse than useless freight of a corrupt and destroyed past, and load up with gratitude and faith and holy determination. We do not please God by the cultivation of the miserable. He would rather see us happy than see us depressed. You would rather see your children laugh than see them cry, and your heavenly Father has no fondness for hysterics.

Not only forget your pardoned transgressions, but allow others to forget them. The chief stock on hand of many people is to recount in prayer-meetings and pulpits what big scoundrels they once were. They not only will not forget their forgiven deficits, but they seem to be determined that the church and the world shall not forget them. If you want to declare that you have been the chief of sinners and extol the grace that could save such a wretch as you were, do so, but do not go into particulars. Do not tell how many times you got drunk or to what bad places you went or how many free rides you had in the prison van before you were converted. Lump it, brother; give it to us in bulk. If you have any scars got in honorable warfare, show them; but if you have scars got in ignoble warfare, do not display them. I know you will quote the Bible reference to the horrible pit from which you were digged. Yes, be thankful for that rescue, but do not make displays of the mud of that horrible pit, or splash it over other people. Sometimes I have felt in Christian meetings discomfited and unfit for Christian service because I had done none of those things which seemed to be in the estimation of many necessary for Christian usefulness, for I never swore a word or never got drunk or went to compromising places or was guilty of assault and battery or never uttered a slanderous word or never did any one a hurt, although I knew my heart was sinful enough; and I said to myself: ’93There is no use of my trying to do any good for I never went through those depraved experiences,’94 but afterward I saw consolation in the thought that no one gained any ordination by the laying on of the hands of dissoluteness and infamy. And though an ordinary moral life, ending in a Christian life, may not be as dramatic a story to tell about, let us be grateful to God rather than worry about it, if we have never plunged into outward abominations. It may be appropriate in a meeting of reformed drunkards or reformed debauchees to quote for those not reformed how desperate and nasty you once were, but do not drive a scavenger’92s cart into assemblages of people, the most of whom have always been decent and respectable. But I have been sometimes in great evangelistic meetings where people went into particulars about the sins that they once committed so much so that I felt like putting my hand on my pocket-book or calling for the police lest these reformed men might fall from grace and go at their old business of theft or drunkenness or cut-throatery. If your sins have been forgiven and your life purified, forget the waywardness of the past, and allow others to forget it.

But, what I most want in the light of this text to impress upon my hearers and readers is that we have a sin’97forgetting God. Suppose that on the Last Day’97called the Last Day because the sun will never again rise upon our earth, the earth itself being flung into fiery demolition’97supposing that on that Last Day a group of infernal spirits should somehow get near enough the Gate of Heaven and challenge our entrance, and say: ’93How canst thou, the Just Lord, let those souls into the realm of supernal gladness? Why they said a great many things they never ought to have said, and they did a great many things they ought never to have done. Sinners are they; sinners all.’94 And suppose God should deign to answer, he might say: ’93Yes; but did not my only Son die for their ransom? Did he not pay the price? Not one drop of blood was retained in his arteries, not one nerve of his that was not wrung in the torture. He took in his own body and soul all the suffering that those sinners deserve. They pleaded that sacrifice. They took the full pardon that I promised to all who, through my Son, earnestly applied for it, and it passed out of my mind that they were offenders. I forgot all about it. Yes; I forgot all about it. ’91Their sins and their iniquities do I remember no more.’92’93 A sin-forgetting God! That is clear beyond, and far above a sin-pardoning God. How often we hear it said: ’93I can forgive, but I cannot forget.’94 That is equal to saying: ’93I verbally admit it is all right, but I will keep the old grudge good.’94 Human forgiveness is often a flimsy affair. It does not go deep down. It does not reach far up. It does not fix things up. The contestants may shake hands on passing each other and they may speak the ’93Good-morning’94 or the ’93Goodnight,’94 but the cordiality never returns. The relations always remain strained. There is something in the demeanor that seems to say: ’93I would not do you harm; indeed, I wish you well, but that unfortunate affair can never pass out of my mind.’94 There may no hard words pass between them, but until death breaks in the same coolness remains. But God lets our pardoned offenses go into oblivion. He never throws them up to us again. He feels as kindly toward us as though we had been spotless and positively angelic all along.

Many years ago a family, consisting of the husband and wife and little girl of two years, lived far out in a cabin on a Western prairie. The husband took a few cattle to market. Before he started his little child asked him to buy for her a doll, and he promised. He could, after the sale of the cattle, purchase household necessities, and certainly would not forget the doll he had promised. In the village to which he went he sold the cattle and obtained the groceries for his household and the doll for his little darling. He started home along the dismal road at night fall. As he went along on horseback, a thunderstorm broke, and in the most lonely part of the road and in the heaviest part of the storm, he heard a child cry. Robbers had been known to do some bad work along that road, and it was known that this herdsman had money with him, the price of the cattle sold. The herdsman first thought it was a stratagem to have him halt and be despoiled of his treasures, but the child’92s cry became more keen and rending, and so he dismounted and felt around in the darkness and all in vain, until he thought of a hollow that he remembered near the road where the child might be, and for that he started, and, sure enough, found a little one fagged out and drenched of the storm and almost dead. He wrapped it up as well as he could and mounted his horse and resumed his journey home. Coming in sight of his cabin, he saw it all lighted up, and supposed his wife had kindled all these lights so as to guide her husband through the darkness. But, no. The house was full of excitement and the neighbors were gathered and stood around the wife of the house, who was insensible as from some great calamity. On inquiry, the returned husband found that the little child of that cabin was gone. She had wandered out to meet her father and get the present he had promised, and the child was lost. Then the father unrolled from the blanket the child he had found in the fields, and, lo! it was his own child, and the lost one of the prairie home, and the cabin quaked with the shout over the lost one found. How suggestive of the fact that once we were lost in the open fields, or among the mountain crags, God’92s wandering children, and he found us, dying in the tempest, and wrapped us in the mantle of his love and fetched us home, gladness and congratulation bidding us welcome. The fact is that the world does not know God, or they would all flock to him. Through their own blindness or the fault of some rough preaching that has got abroad in the centuries, many men and women have an idea that God is a tyrant, an oppressor, an autocrat, a Nana Sahib, a malevolent Almighty; it is a slander against the heavens; it is a defamation of the infinities.

I counted in my Bible three hundred and four times the word ’93mercy’94 single or compounded with other words. I counted in my Bible four hundred and seventy-three times the word ’93love’94 single or compounded with other words. Then I got tired counting. Perhaps you might count more, being better at figures. But the Hebrew and the Greek and the English languages have been taxed until they cannot pay any more tribute to the love and mercy and kindness and grace and charity and tenderness and friendship and benevolence and sympathy and bounteousness and fatherliness and motherliness and patience and pardon of our God.

There are certain names so magnetic that their pronunciation thrills all who hear it. Such is the name of the Italian soldier and liberator, Garibaldi. Marching with his troops, he met a shepherd who was in great distress because he had lost a lamb. Garibaldi said to his troops: ’93Let us help this poor shepherd find his lamb.’94 And so, with lanterns and torches, they explored the mountains, but did not find the lamb, and after an unsuccessful search late at night they went to their encampment. The next morning Garibaldi was found asleep far on into the day, and they wakened him for some purpose and found that he had not given up the search when the soldiers did, but had kept on still further into the night and had found it, and he pulled down the blankets from his couch and there lay the lamb, which Garibaldi ordered immediately taken to its owner. So the Commander of all the Hosts of Heaven turned aside from his glorious and victorious march through the centuries of heaven, and said: ’93I will go and recover that lost world, and that race of whom Adam was the progenitor, and let all who will accompany me.’94 And through the night they came, but I do not see that the angelic escort came any farther than the clouds, but their most illustrious leader came all the way down, and by the time his errand is done our little world, our wandering and lost world, our world fleecy with the light, will be found in the bosom of the Great Shepherd, and, then, all heaven will take up the cantata, and sing: ’93The lost sheep found.’94 So I set open the wide gate of my text, inviting you all to come into the mercy and pardon of God; yea, still further, into the ruins of the place where once was kept the knowledge of your iniquities. The place has been torn down and the records destroyed, and you will find the ruins more dilapidated and broken and prostrate than the ruins of Melrose or Kenilworth, for from these last ruins you can pick up some fragment of a sculptured stone, or you can see the curve of some broken arch, but after your repentance and your forgiveness, you cannot find in all the memory of God a fragment of all your pardoned sins so large as a needle’92s point. ’93Their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more.’94 Now that will surprise you if you will climb to the top of a bluff back of Jerusalem (it took us only five or ten minutes to climb it) and see what went on when the plateau of limestone was shaken by a paroxysm that set the rocks which had been upright aslant, and on the trembling crosspiece of the split lumber hung the quivering form of him whose life was thrust out by metallic points of cruelty that sickened the noonday sun till it fainted and fell back on the black lounge of the Judean midnight.

Six different kinds of sounds were heard on that night which was interjected into the daylight of Christ’92s assassination: the neighing of the war-horses, for some of the soldiers were in the saddle, was one sound; the bang of the hammers was a second sound; the jeer of malignants was a third sound; the weeping of friends and coadjutors was a fourth sound; the plash of blood on the rocks was a fifth sound; the groan of the expiring Lord was a sixth sound. And they all commingled into one sadness. Over a grave in Russia where wolves were pursuing a load of travelers, and to save them a servant sprang from the sled into the mouths of the wild beasts, and was devoured, and thereby the other lives were saved, are inscribed the words: ’93Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friend.’94 A surgeon has been known, in a case of tracheotomy, with his own lips to draw from the windpipe of the diphtheritic patient the deadly growth, and the patient recovered though the surgeon died, and all have honored the self-sacrifice. But all other scenes of sacrifice pale before this most illustrious martyr of all time and all eternity. After that agonizing spectacle in behalf of our fallen race nothing about the sin-forgetting God is too difficult for my faith, and I accept the promise, and will you not all accept it? ’93Their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more.’94

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage