Latter Day Saints' Messenger and Advocate/Volume 3/Number 4/Reflections on the past
Reflections on the past, and the prospects of the present year.
If we would not live in vain, but profit by every day's experience, we are as necessarily led to the conclusion that our duty to ourselves, to our friends, to the community in which we live, and to our God, require that we occasionally take a retrospective view of what has passed, as well as to look forward with pleasing anticipations to coming events.
Every man may learn something of true philosophy, by his own observation. Causes inevitably produce effects, and the same causes are sure to be followed by the same effects. Idleness, extravagance and folly are productive of poverty, wretchedness and shame; while on the contrary, industry, prudence and economy tend directly to wealth and honorable distinction. In short, all the vices, however popular, degrade their votaries, and sink them in the scale of beings, even in their own estimation. Time moves on with a steady pace, while events transpire that discover the secrets of hearts black with infamy and crime. Events also transpire that immortalize others and render them famous on the page of history: their deeds are celebrated, their names live long after their bodies have mouldered back to dust.
A round of duties, a succession of events, of causes and effects, have filled up the history of the past year and left the contemplative mind to profit by experience, or the one of no reflection to rush forward in uncertainty, as much as if philosophy were never the study of man, or effect never followed a cause. Hence the wretchedness and woe incident to the human family.—Man does not reflect, he heeds not the teachings of experience; his hopes, although fallacious, are, that the order of nature, in his case, at least, will be reversed, that he shall find favor in the sight of God and man, while he pursues the same course towards those around him that has always resulted in entire defeat and blasted all his former prospects. Surely reflection is necessary; and well has the poet commended in the following lines:
A soul without reflection,
Like a pile without inhabitants, to ruin runs.
It will not only be necessary to reflect on what is past, on the failure of our former plans and operations to produce that favorable result, that happy issue that our fond hopes had anticipated; but we should study the cause of such failure or we are in no wise benefitted. If a man cast him down from a precipice, contrary to the dictates of a sound mind and the best advice of his friends, he has no just cause of complaint, if he fracture his skull or dislocate his limbs.
If he be idle and vicious, poverty, wretchedness and guilt will be his companions. If he be ignorant he is at the mercy of every knave. If he be tyrannical, obstinate and wilful, he may be rich, but his friends will be few, and those few, will be as far from being real friends, as they are from being honest men or men of sense.
Men may give to tyrants, and thereby purchase their influence or their silence, which is sometimes better, but men of worth, of candor, of intelligence, despise an avaricious tyrant and the fawning sycophants that surround him.
A noble, independent mind, weighs evidences and calculates consequences; reflects on the past and judges of the future with a philosophic accuracy.