The curtain of the future – Sunday, January 19, 1958
For a moment or two we should like to turn to yet another side of the subject of knowing more concerning the future, and in doing so to cite a quoted sentence which says in substance that the Lord God with grand politeness . . . draws down before us an impenetrable screen…1 Cicero said this on the subject: “For my part, I think that a knowledge of the future would be a disadvantage. . .. Undoubtedly ignorance of future ills is more useful than knowledge of them.”2
And Alexander Pope characterized it in three concise couplets:
0 blindness to the future! kindly giv’n,
That each may fill the circle mark’d by Heav’n;
Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,
A hero perish or a sparrow fall,
Atoms or systems into ruin hurl’d,
And now a bubble burst, and now a world.3
No doubt in many ways it was a “grand politeness” that caused the Creator to draw the curtain of the future before us, and it means in effect, that the Lord God meant us to live in part at least by faith—for if we knew further of the future we would, in effect, be carrying the weight of it around with us.
Foreknowledge can become a burden as it anticipates the sorrows as well as the successes. Suppose, for example, we knew when our loved ones would have to leave us, or that we knew in advance the day or manner of our own death, or of accidents or illnesses —such foreknowledge would hang over us heavily like a weight that we were never quite free from. And since it is sometimes difficult enough to carry around the weight of present problems (and since life also has its pleasant surprises, as well as its unforeseen sorrows), it would seem that the Creator knew us well and planned wisely when with grand politeness he drew the curtain of the future before us and gave us faith to live each hour, each day, with work, with learning, with loved ones, with decisions to make, with commandments to keep, with all the problems and opportunities that are ours, as we move on toward those eternal purposes which the Lord God has given, with a quiet certainty and assurance that all injustices will be righted, that all inequities will be compensated, and that the compelling questions will be answered us.
Thus, as the Creator draws the curtain of the future before us, we can face it with such faith as Emerson suggested in this single satisfying sentence: “All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.”4
1Emerson, Experience
2Cicero, De Divinatione, Bk. ii, ch. 9, sec. 23
3Pope, Essay on Man, Epis. i, 1. 85
4Emerson
January 19, 1958
Broadcast Number 1,483