Gold Nugget 291 - What We Are

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      If god is pleased to spare a man so long as to reach the fullness of old age, that man really lives through nearly three generations; and yet it is only upon one of them that even he can exert an active influence. 

      The first generation moulds him, with its various educational forces.  The second generation he may distinctly impress with his own individuality; of it he may become one of the potent forces.  On the third he can only exert a passive influence; he is, for the most part, out of sympathy with it, and he presently finds that he had better step aside, and let the current of life and thought pass on.  No matter how long we may live, no one of us can influence more than just our one generation of thirty years or more. 

      Some men serve their generation by being before it, and giving expression in it to the thoughts and truths and sentiments which properly belong to the age that is yet to be.  Such men do a great work by anticipating the coming time and preventing the transitions and changes from becoming too abrupt..  Such men must accept the peril of being misunderstood, and called hard names until they die, and the new generation recognizes in them its heroes, forerunners, and apostles.

      Some men belong precisely to their own generation:  they are exactly adapted to it; they never get beyond it; they are born into its thought and feeling; they live in it, work for it, worthily express it, and pass away with it; usually leaving no name (but) only the good fruitage and the silent seeding of their good works.  These are the thousands of the unknown ones, but they are the “salt of the earth.”

      And some men seem to be always in the past generation.  Their thoughts and feelings all belong to times past and gone.  A queer, old-fashioned life they live amongst us, and their very talk sounds strange.  And yet these links we need, lest, in the pride of our present attainments, we should try to break the bonds of the holy and the good that have gone on before us.

      No generation dares forget the past out of which it has come.  But no generation can afford to keep only a downward and a backward look; it must lift up its head, peer away yonder, and hail the “good time coming.” … And exactly what we all may do, wherever our lot is cast, is this – keep the moral standard up, and raise the moral standard higher.  And this can only be done by lives, by examples, by personal character.  What we are may be the leavening fore of our generation in our sphere. …

      The man who faithfully serves his generation may be sure of this – his influence will never fade out, will never die.  And God will show one day how he helped on his kingdom of righteousness and peace. 

The Pulpit Commentary, Acts I p. 434, Acts 13:36, (R. Tuck)

Gold Nugget 291

What We Are

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