The Way of Remembrance.
Here, then, the message of an Apostle, nay, even the teaching of the Holy Spirit, is identified with sacred remembrance remembrance of holy words and deep impressions dropped upon the heart in the highest moments of life. The apprehension of Divine things consists, it would seem, not in new discoveries, not in strained and laboured thought, but in the reawakening of the pure and simple mind and the gathering up of every Christlike image and affection from behind and from within.
I. This power, already known to Plato as reminiscence, is no other than that appeal to remembrance which Christ identified with the function of the Holy Spirit. This appeal, instead of passing downwards, like knowledge upon ignorance, or forward, like reason from point to point, moves inward towards a centre of faith and feeling that holds us all. It is by reversing our ambitious steps, not by advancing into original ideas, but by relapse upon simple affections, not by seizing new stations in philosophy, but by recovering the artlessness of the child, that we must find the joy of redemption and the wisdom of faith.
II. We have perhaps two sorts of memory, two ways at least in which we are referred to a prior state of the given object, and enabled to recognise it as not new. (1) There is the purely personal memory which reflects always the image of our individual selves, revives our actual experiences, writes our own biography, and hangs round the gallery of thought the portraits on which we love to gaze. Without this our being would have no thread of conscious continuity, our character no liability to judgment, our affections no root of tenacity. There are few lives which have not thus their secret store of natural pieties, their holy font of sweet and reverent affections, wherewith to rebaptise the dry heathenism of the present. (2) But besides this personal memory of our own past states, we have another, deeper and more refined, but not less real: an impersonal faculty which has another object than our own individual selves; a power of recognising, as ever with us, the secret presence of a Holy, a True, a God, that is not our own, that is above us, though within us, that has a right over us, which may be slighted, but cannot be gainsaid. When you wake up to the perception of deeper obligation or the consciousness of a sanctity unfelt before, your instant recognition of it is ever with you, seen or unseen, does not deceive you; it is not a new glory that is kindled, but the dull mind that is cleansed; and if the secret of the Lord were not consciously with you, it only waited till you were among them that fear Him.
J. Martineau, Hours of Thought,vol. ii., p. 92.