‘NEW EVERY MORNING’
The Lord’s mercies … are new every morning.
In the classical myths, Tithonus, a son of Laomedon, king of Troy, was so fair and winsome a youth that Eos, or Aurora, goddess of the morning, fell in love with him, and therefore prayed the gods to grant him immortality, in order that she might have him as her husband always. Her request was granted; but in asking immortality for Tithonus, Eos did not also ask eternal youth for him, hence he grew old and decrepit, so that death itself would have been a blessing; but that he could not have, and finally he was changed into a grasshopper as the symbol of unattractive and helpless age.
This myth involves the universal truth that, with our world as it is, the waste and decay which are a sure accompaniment of prolonged activity and progress would make life itself a hopeless burden, unless there be given with it a possibility of continued freshness, or of some periodic renewal of youth and strength. So the human heart yearns unceasingly for an ever-renewed beginning, when the tirelessly exhausting forces of life may rise from their lower ebb and take a fresh start onward. This yearning it is that has been the impulse in all the storied searchings for the fabled Fountain of Youth, and that gives a fancied sense of gain in the very suggestion of a mid-winter ‘New Year’s’ morning. This it is that prompts the heart to join in the thought of the dying Old Year, and of an incoming New Year.
I. If only the ‘New Year’ were a new year.—If only the old were really made new at that time; if old things had then actually passed away, and all things had become new; if all the sins and the sorrows, all the mistakes and the disappointments, of our lives hitherto, were for ever done away with—in themselves and in their consequences—at that anniversary boundary of the passing time; if then there was to us an absolutely new start, with new strength and new hope and new possibilities at every point of our former failure and of our former loss—what a season the New Year would be to us in fact, instead of in fancy! But, as it is, the New Year is but an empty name to so many who greet its coming with fond imaginings, only to find so quickly that the old is in the new, and that, indeed, the new is older than the old.
II. Human wisdom gives no more help toward the attainment of immortal youth and of constantly renewing freshness than was supplied by classic mythology. This ‘New Year’ may be to you truly a new year, Its newness may be to you ‘new every morning.’ To make it new, you have but to trust Him Who maketh all things new. Restful trust in Him will give you continual renewal of strength and hope and joy.
Illustration
‘Came North, and South, and East, and West,
Four sages to a mountain-crest,
Each pledged to search the world around
Until the wondrous well he found.
‘Before a crag they made their seat,
Pure bubbling waters at their feet.
Said one, “This well is small and mean,
Too petty for a village green!”
Another said, “So small and dumb,
From earth’s deep centre can it come?”
The third, “This water seems not rare;
Not even bright, but pale as air!”
The fourth, “Thick crowds I looked to see;
Where the true well is, these must be.”
‘They rose and left the mountain-crest,—
One North, one South, one East, one West.
O’er many seas and deserts wide
They wandered, thirsting till they died.
‘The simple shepherds by the mountain dwell,
And dip their pitchers in the wondrous well.’