Jeremiah 5-8

Our modern world displays little, if any, real interest in the ancient. Rather, there is a constant craze for the new and the novel, even in the Church. Of course, just because something is old does not mean it is right, or true, or even of lasting worth. Something that is old may be falling apart and fit only for the scrap heap.

So why does the Lord urge us to seek the ancient paths? By studying history, especially the history of God’s people, we can see what certain beliefs and spiritual practices produced. We can test the spiritual fruit of ages past and see whether it is nutritious or not. We cannot do that with our present beliefs and spiritual practices, at least, not safely. When we test present beliefs and practices, try them on for size, those beliefs and practices may lead us astray before we have time to correct our course. By looking to the past, we can discover what is tried and true versus what is merely old and shabby, and we can opt for the good way, knowing in advance that it will lead us in the right direction.

C. S. Lewis, in his Introduction to Sister Penelope’s translation of St. Athanasius’ The Incarnation of the Word of God, writes,

The only safety is to have a standard of plain, central Christianity (“mere Christianity” as Baxter called it) which puts the controversies of the moment in their proper perspective. Such a standard can be acquired only from the old books. It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united—united with each other and against earlier and later ages—by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?”—lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.