banished wholly from consciousness.
“Thou shalt forget thy misery, and remember it as waters that pass away.”
—Job II :16.
The memory is renewed and revived by righteous forgetting—forgetting the evils and the nothings, the vanities of existence, and remembering only its eternal verities, the Good and the Divine.
True repentance is our flight from some burning Sodom and Gomorrah, and when we have once left an evil state let us not look back upon it.
“Remember Lot’s wife.”
—Luke 17:32.
Those who dwell in past experiences grow fossilized, and age early. There is only the eternal present, the Now-Good, for us to live in. Whatever joys and happiness we have had in the past belong to the Kingdom of Heaven, and we shall know them again, for they are eternal.
Even though we appear to fall into sin again and again, yet each time we should rise up as though we had not fallen. No one is beaten unless he thinks he is. There is no backsliding in Truth. If a person seems to fall away, then you may know that one was not as advanced as appearances indicated. Never think you have “gone back” from Truth. You may seem to be in the valley many days, not seeing the Way as plainly as when you were on the mountain-tops, yet you are nearer your goal. While you are going through extreme experiences you are in mountainous regions of mind, and progression will be marked by many ups and downs, going into valleys as well as ascending mountain peaks. The spokes of a wheel cannot always remain up if the wheel is to go forward. They go
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