The Old and the New 10/24/43

Scripture: I Thessalonians 5: 9-28

Text: I Thessalonians 5: 21; “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.”

Beatrice Webb, an English social writer, wrote these words in her diary six years after her mother’s death: “There latter days I constantly think of Mother; sometimes the feeling of her presence is so strong that I am tempted into a kind of communion with her. We knew each other so little in her lifetime. Strangely enough I love her better now; I feel that she at last knows me.” These words sound like a frank confession of the gap or chasm that many times exists between people of the older and of the younger generations. It is common for young people, on the one hand, to complain that they are not understood! On the other hand, many elder people are heard to cry despairingly, “Well I give up. I don’t know what these young people are coming to.”

It is certainly unfortunate to allow this gap to exist throughout life to be bridged, as in Beatrice Webb’s experience, only by death. It is certainly worth while to bend every effort to cover any breach between the older and the younger generations here and now, because those who do manage to bridge the gap get a lot more fun and richness out of life. Though this gap has always existed, nevertheless we notice it particularly in our age. The blundering is not the fault of old folks, nor of young folks - but of both.

Seamen know that there is likely to be trouble where two strong tides, or currents of any kind, meet. Boats can be wrecked at such places. The generations are sometimes torn by the conflict of two strong currents. There is the tide of the past which pushes from behind with all its accumulated ideas of other years. It is strong with the influence of what our fathers and grandfathers thought and did.

But there is another tide which comes to meet us in the present. It moves with the power of new discoveries and knowledge. These two tides meet and often conflict in the life of many families of today. The two generations get their hand on the tiller of life’s ship at the same time. One says, “Let us pull the rudder so that the ship of life will ride under the influences of the future,” while the other strives to whirl the tiller over in the opposite direction so that life will move under the influences of the past. Cooperation and some sort of understanding is vitally needed if the ship of life is not to flounder in unhappiness, bitterness and misunderstanding. There is a considerable amount of light to be thrown on this problem from a sentence which Paul wrote in one of his letters to the church at Tessalonica. The sentence is this: “Prove all things, hold fast that which is good.” There is immense strength to be found in intelligently applying the principle contained in that sentence to our present life.

Both the things of the past which older people love, and the things of the present and future which younger people want, need to be tried out and tested in experience. “Prove all things, hold fast that which is good.” Both the old and the new must be tested for their usefulness in life.

There are many ways in which the differences between the two generations may be characterized. One is to say this: that the older generation is good at “holding fast;” the younger generation is good at “letting go.” Much of our trouble lies in the fact that both of these natural tendencies of maturity and youth are needed in the present.

Many people, especially older people, are good at holding fast. Let no one belittle the vast contribution which they make by holding to the good ideas of other years. Robinson, in his book, Mind in the making, says, “It has required three centuries of scientific thought to enable a modern chemist to center his attention on electrons and their relation to the mysterious nucleus of the atom, or to permit an embryologist to study the early stirrings of the fertilized egg.”

The powerful telescope on Mount Wilson, which can sweep the heavens revealing a billion stars, is made possible only by all the knowledge accumulated and held since Galileo made his first primitive lens. The inventions of today and the inventions that will come tomorrow are the result of the refining of the discoveries and knowledge of the past. Einstein makes progress because other generations have held on to the discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton and passed them on to him. The huge Baldwin Locomotives which can pull a train from New York to Chicago in twenty hours or less, are doing so only because construction engineers have held fast to the results of Watt’s simple experiment with steam.

Every progressive effort of education, law, medicine or engineering is the result of holding to the accumulated experience of the past and building upon it. When we cut ourselves off from the past, we encounter trouble and setbacks. It is said that the Eskimos are a people whose ancestors emigrated from Europe centuries ago. Some tremendous change in the face of the earth finally cut them off from Europe; ever since, they have been eking out a mere existence in smelly smoky hovels of snow or wood, with oily blubber or other flesh as their food. Their racial grip on the art, literature and music of the past in Asia was broken and those things were lost to them. We would all be primitive people and paupers if it were not for the tenacity with which older people hang on to the important experience of the past. These things are our heritage.

But we must not hold on to the past without discrimination. Let young people demand that the things of the past which are to be held to be true and genuine in experience. And let older people likewise examine the nature of that which they hold to and believe. Older people need to beware lest they load upon their children, along with the good, a lot of useless and outworn ideas. Some of the notions that we hold to are like the fossil remains of prehistoric animals embedded in the rocks - real enough, but nevertheless extinct. There is, of course, no virtue in holding fast to a principle or practice simply because it is old. Discrimination is necessary. The thing must be positively useful. “Hold fast not to that which was good, but to that which is good.”

Now, as I said before, there are many people today, especially young folk, who are good at “letting go.” And again let me say let no one sneer at the vast contribution of those who want to pry us loose from some of the notions of other years which are worn out and useless in modern experience. We would doubtless hang on to a multitude of practices and precepts which have no place in the present and less in the future, if it were not for the aggressive influence of the young in thought and years who are everlastingly at us to let go.

It is a part of the priceless heritage of young people to believe that they can improve on the life of earlier generations. After long experience with young men, Dean Briggs of Harvard said, “No boy or girl of spirit grows up without threatening to wear out the life of older people, who do not care to be disturbed.” “So long as the human race breed spirited youth, so long will youth agitate reform. Much of the agitation passes off in time, after producing no little trouble among teachers, families and friends.” “But in that small per cent” (of agitation which survives) “lies progress, or it may be salvation.”

Thank God for the desire of young people to let go! If we ever lose our grip upon the discrimination made between races because of the color of the pigment in their skins, it will be because young people can not see the value of these ancient prejudices which we humans have held so fast.

Let members of the older generation have respect for young people. They have a contribution to make to the life of this present generation which they must make now, if it is ever to be made.

Let members of the younger generation be careful how they try to make men lose their grip on the past. Life may be either enriched of impoverished by what you and I choose to hold to and what you and I choose to let go. History bears witness to the record of those who let go of ideas and customs simply because they were old. It is foolish to think of dropping something simply because it is old.

When the common people of France rose up to throw off the yoke of slavery and oppression which the Bourbon monarchy had held on their shoulders, they did not discriminate. They let go of all the former ideas, all the customs, all the principles of government known to them, simply because they were old and had belonged to the Bourbon dictators. Did they find peace and prosperity by doing so? They did not! By letting go, they brought in an era of confusion which they themselves termed “The Reign of Terror.” Danton, who had urged them to banish everything connected with the old government, suddenly found himself in prison facing the guillotine at the hands of his own people. He was so discouraged with the effects of letting go of the past that he was heard to say, as he looked out of the prison window a few days before he died, “One had better be a poor fisherman than meddle with the affairs of government.”

Some of the most conspicuous present illustrations of the disastrous results which follow failure to discriminate between that to which one shall be held fast, and that which shall be let go, is the state of the soviet government of Russia. The administration tried among many other things to force the people to relinquish their grip upon religion. Why? Is it because they have proved it to be useless? No! It is because it belonged to the old regime and, without discrimination, they determined to throw overboard everything connected with the government of the czars. They seem to be reaching for religion again now.

We can not afford to be like a small child whose hands are full of old toys. When someone offers him a new one, he drops the old ones without giving a thought to their value. His grasp is based on the immature assumption, utterly incapable of proof, that what is new must be better than what is old. There are things without number which should be discarded. Let us see that only that which is useless, however, is left behind.

It all comes down, you see, to the conclusion that the characteristic contributions of each generation are necessary. Civilization, or the good life, depends on our ability both to “hold on” and to “let go.” There is no constructive progress without the practice of both. The trouble with us in any so-called problems of youth versus conservatism is that we allow it to split us apart.

It is necessary for both young and old to “prove all things,” to penetrate again and again into the nature and values of things both old and new, to test things by the standard of usefulness for the present years.

It is hard for older people to reexamine principles or practices in order to prove them. It is also hard for the younger people, who are proverbially in a hurry, to prove what does not produce immediate results. But it must be done. Proving things is a job which makes heavy demands and takes the whole of lifetime.

In 1845 Florence Nightingale told her parents that she wished to become a nurse. Nursing was not then the noble and respected profession that it is now. Her parents were horrified. The head of a London hospital told Mr. Nightingale that she had never known a nurse who was not a drunkard or otherwise immoral. They all said that nurses were all drunkards. Of course he and his wife refused the request of their daughter. They held fast to the idea that nursing and immorality were one and the same thing.

But Florence had a different idea. She had caught a new vision of the noble possibilities in nursing from a German minister, Theodore Fliedner. He was beginning to train women of high character for ministry to the neglected sick.

Florence might have run off and studied nursing in spite of her parents. Or her parents might have refused to discuss the matter further with her. But parents and child kept patiently turning the matter over and over until at length at the end of eight years, the parents consented to let her try it. They had become willing to prove a new experience with their daughter. And that proving resulted not only in correcting and improving their own outlook but raised, through Florence Nightingale, a whole profession to a higher, nobler level.

To go at our problems with Christian patience, to be willing to prove all things, over a long period of time if necessary, that is the Christian way to solve them.

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Dates and places delivered:

Wailuku Union Church, January 18, 1931

Puunene Japanese Church, February 8, 1931

Paia Japanese Church, February 8, 1931

Kahului Union Church, March 22, 1931

Puunene Japanese Church, January 14, 1934

Kahului Union Church, January 14, 1934

Puunene Hawaiian Church, April 28, 1935

Pilgrim Church, Honolulu, April 11, 1937 AM

Wisconsin Rapids, October 24, 1943