Can there be progress which is not progression—which does not leave a past from which to start—on which to rest our foot when we spring forward? No wise man kicks the ladder from beneath him, or obliterates the traces of the road through which he has travelled, or pulls down the memorials he has built by the way side. We cannot get on without linking our present and our future with our past. All reaction is destructive—all progress conservative. When we have destroyed that which the past built up, what reward have we?—we are forced to fall back, and have to begin anew. “Novelty,” as Lord Bacon says, “cannot be content to add, but it must deface.” For this very reason novelty is not progress, as the French would try to persuade themselves and us. We gain nothing by defacing and trampling down the idols of the past to set up new ones in their places—let it be sufficient to leave them behind us, measuring our advance by keeping them in sight.
35.
E—— was compassionating to-day the old and the invalided; those whose life is prolonged in spite of suffering; and she seemed, even out of the excess of her pity and sympathy, to wish them fairly out of the world; but it is a mistake in reasoning and feeling. She does not know how much of happiness may consist with suffering, with physical suffering, and even with mental suffering.
36.
“Renoncez dans votre âme, et renoncez y fermement, une fois pour toutes, à vouloir vous connaître au-delà de cette existence passagère qui vous est imposée, et vous redeviendrez agréable à Dieu, utile aux autres hommes, tranquille avec vous-mêmes.”
This does not mean “renounce hope or faith in the future.” No! But renounce that perpetual craving after a selfish interest in the unrevealed future life which takes the true relish from the duties and the pleasures of this. We can conceive of no future life which is not a continuation of this: to anticipate in that future life, another life, a different life; what is it but to call in doubt our individual identity?
If we pray, “O teach us where and what is peace!” would not the answer be, “In the grave ye shall have it—not before?” Yet is it not strange that those who believe most absolutely in an after-life, yet think of the grave as peace? Now, if we carry this life with us—and what other life can we carry with us, unless we cease to be ourselves—how shall there be peace?