THE THRESHOLD GRACE
_MEDITATIONS IN THE PSALMS_
BY
PERCY C. AINSWORTH
AUTHOR OF 'THE PILGRIM CHURCH.' 'THE BLESSED LIFE,' ETC.
PREFATORY NOTE
During his brief ministry Mr. Ainsworth published a series of meditations
in the columns of the _Methodist Times_, which are here reprinted by the
kind permission of the Editor, Dr. Scott Lidgett. The rare interest aroused
by the previous publication of Mr. Ainsworth's sermons encourages the hope
that the present volume may find a place in the devotional literature to
which many turn in the quiet hour.
A.K.S.
CONTENTS
I. THE THRESHOLD GRACE
II. THE HABIT OF FAITH
III. THE ONE THING DESIRABLE
IV. EYES AND FEET
V. THE SAFEGUARDED SOUL
VI. A PLEA FOR TEARS
VII. DELIVERANCE WITH HONOUR
VIII. PETITION AND COMMUNION
IX. HAUNTED HOURS
X. THE WINGS OF THE DOVE
XI. A NEW SONG
I.
THE THRESHOLD GRACE
The Lord shall keep thy going out and thy coming
in, from this time forth and for evermore.
Ps. cxxi, 8.
Going out and coming in. That is a picture of life. Beneath this old Hebrew
phrase there lurks a symbolism that covers our whole experience. But let us
just now look at the most literal, and by no means the least true,
interpretation of these words. One of the great dividing-lines in human
life is the threshold-line. On one side of this line a man has his 'world
within the world,' the sanctuary of love, the sheltered place of peace, the
scene of life's most personal, sacred, and exclusive obligations. And on
the other side lies the larger life of mankind wherein also a man must take
his place and do his work. Life is spent in crossing this threshold-line,
going out to the many and coming in to the few, going out to answer the
call of labour and coming in to take the right to rest. And over us all
every hour there watches the Almighty Love. The division-lines in the life
of man have nothing that corresponds to them in the love of God. We may be
here or there, but He is everywhere.
_The Lord shall keep thy going out._ Life has always needed that promise.
There is a pledge of help for men as they fare forth to the world's work.
It was much for the folk of an early time to say that as they went forth
the Lord went with them, but it is more for men to say and know that same
thing to-day. The _going out_ has come to mean more age after age,
generation after generation. It was a simpler thing once than it is now.
'Thy going out'--the shepherd to his flocks, the farmer to his field, the
merchant to his merchandise. There are still flocks and fields and markets,
but where are the leisure, grace, and simplicity of life for him who has
any share in the world's work? Men go out to-day to face a life shadowed by
vast industrial, commercial, and social problems. Life has grown
complicated, involved, hard to understand, difficult to deal with. Tension,
conflict, subtlety, surprise, and amid it all, or over it all, a vast
brooding weariness that ever and again turns the heart sick. Oh the pains
and the perils of the going out! There are elements of danger in modern
life that threaten all the world's toilers, whatever their work may be and
wherever they may have to do it. There is the danger that always lurks in
_things_--a warped judgement, a confused reckoning, a narrowed outlook. It
is so easily possible for a man to be at close grips with the world and yet
to be ever more and more out of touch with its realities. The danger in the
places where men toil is not that God is denied with a vociferous atheism;
it is that He is ignored by an unvoiced indifference. It is not the babel
of the market-place that men need to fear; it is its silence. If we say
that we live only as we love, that we are strong only as we are pure, that
we are successful only as we become just and good, the world into which we
go forth does not deny these things--but it ignores them. And thus the real
battle of life is not the toil for bread. It is fought by all who would
keep alive and fresh in their hearts the truth that man doth not live by
bread alone. For no man is this going out easy, for some it is at times
terrible, for all it means a need that only this promise avails to
meet--'The Lord shall keep thy going out.' He shall fence thee about with
the ministry of His Spirit, and give thee grace to know, everywhere and
always, that thou art in this world to live for His kingdom of love and
truth and to grow a soul.
_The Lord, shall keep ... thy coming in._ It might seem to some that once a
man was safely across the threshold of his home he might stand in less need
of this promise of help. But experience says otherwise. The world has
little respect for any man's threshold. It is capable of many a bold and
shameless intrusion. The things that harass a man as he earns his tread
sometimes haunt him as he eats it. No home is safe unless faith be the
doorkeeper. 'In peace will I both lay me down and sleep, for Thou, Lord,
alone makest me to dwell in safety.' The singer of that song knew that, as
in the moil of the world, so also in the shelter of the place he named his
dwelling-place, peace and safety were not of his making, but of God's
giving.
Sometimes there is a problem and a pain waiting for a man across his own
threshold. Many a man can more easily look upon the difficulties and perils
of the outer world than he can come in and look into the pain-lined face of
his little child. If we cannot face alone the hostilities on one side of
our threshold we cannot face alone the intimacies on the other side of it.
After all, life is whole and continuous. Whatever the changes in the
setting of life, there is no respite from living. And that means there is
no leisure from duty, no rest from the service of obedience, no cessation
in the working of all those forces by means of which, or in spite of which,
life is ever being fashioned and fulfilled.
And now let us free our minds from the literalism of this promise and get a
glimpse of its deeper application to our lives. The threshold of the home
does not draw the truest division-line in life between the outward and the
inward. Life is made up of thought and action, of the manifest things and
the hidden things.
'Thy going out.' That is, our life as it is manifest to others, as it has
points of contact with the world about us. We must go out. We must take up
some attitude toward all other life. We must add our word to the long human
story and our touch to the fashioning of the world. We need the pledge of
divine help in that life of ours in which, for their good or ill, others
must have a place and a part. 'And thy coming in'--into that uninvaded
sanctum of thought. Did we say uninvaded? Not so. In that inner room of
life there sits Regret with her pale face, and Shame with dust on her
forehead, and Memory with tears in her eyes. It is a pitiable thing at
times, is this our coming in. More than one man has consumed his life in a
flame of activity because he could not abide the coming in. 'The Lord shall
keep ... thy coming in.' That means help for every lonely, impotent, inward
hour of life.
Look at the last word of this promise--'for evermore.' Going out and coming
in for evermore. I do not know how these words were interpreted when very
literal meanings were attached to the parabolic words about the streets of
gold and the endless song. But they present no difficulty to us. Indeed,
they confirm that view of the future which is ever taking firmer hold of
men's minds, and which is based on the growing sense of the continuity of
life. To offer a man an eternity of music-laden rest is to offer him a poor
thing. He would rather have his going out and his coming in. Yes, and he
shall have them. All that is purest and best in them shall remain.
Hereafter he shall still go out to find deeper joys of living and wider
visions of life; still come in to greater and ever greater thoughts of God.
II.
THE HABIT OF FAITH
Trust in Him at all times, ye people.
Pour out your heart before Him.
God is a refuge for us.
Ps. lxii. 8.
Here the Psalmist strikes the great note of faith as it should be struck.
He sets it ringing alike through the hours and the years. _Trust in Him at
all times._ Faith is not an act, but an attitude; not an event, but a
principle; not a last resource, but the first and abiding necessity. It is
the constant factor in life's spiritual reckonings. It is the
ever-applicable and the ever-necessary. It is always in the high and
lasting fitness of things. There are words that belong to hours or even
moments, words that win their meaning from the newly created situation. But
faith is not such a word. It stands for something inclusive and imperial.
It is one of the few timeless words in earth's vocabulary. For the deep
roots of it and the wide range of it there is nothing like unto it in the
whole sweep of things spiritual. So the 'all times' trust is not for one
moment to be regarded as some supreme degree of faith unto which one here
and there may attain and which the rest can well afford to look upon as a
counsel of perfection. This exhortation to trust in God at all times
concerns first of all the _nature_ of faith and not the _measure_ of it.
All real faith has the note of the eternal in it. It can meet the present
because it is not of the present. We have grown familiar with the phrase,
'The man of the moment.' But who is this man? Sometimes he is very
literally a man of the moment--an opportunist, a gambler with the hours, a
follower of the main chance. The moment makes him, and passing away unmakes
him. But the true man of the moment is the man to whom the moment is but
one throb in the pulse of eternity. For him the moment does not stand out
in splendid isolation. It is set in its place between that which hath been
and that which shall be. And its true significance is not something abiding
in it, but something running through it. So is it in this great matter of
faith. Only the faith that can trust at all times can trust at any time.
The moment that faith heeds the dictation of circumstance it ceases to be
faith and becomes calculation. All faith is transcendent. It is independent
of the conditions in which it has to live. It is not snared in the strange
web of the tentative and the experimental. He that has for one moment felt
the power of faith has got beyond the dominion of time.
_Trust in Him at all times._ That is the only real escape from confusion
and contradiction in the judgements we are compelled to pass upon life.
Times change so suddenly and inexplicably. The hours seem to be at strife
with each other. We live in the midst of a perpetual conflict between our
yesterdays and our to-days. There is no simple, obvious sequence in the
message of experience. The days will not dovetail into each other. Life is
compact of much that is impossible of true adjustment at the hands of any
time-born philosophy. And in all this seeming confusion there lies the
necessity for faith. Herein it wins its victory. We are to trust God not
because we cannot trace Him, but that by trusting Him we may ever be more
able to trace Him and to see that He has a way through all these winding
and crossing paths. Faith does more than hold a man's hand in the darkness;
it leads him into the light. It is the secret of coherence and harmony. It
does not make experience merely bearable, it makes it luminous and
instructive. It takes the separate or the tangled strands of human
experience and weaves them into one strong cable of help and hope.
_Trust in Him at all times._ Then faith at its best is a habit. Indeed,
religion at its best is a habit, too! We are sometimes too ready to
discount the worth of the habitual in our religious life. We put a premium
on self-consciousness. We reduce the life of faith to a series of acts of
faith of varying difficulty and import, but each detached from the rest and
individually apprehended of the soul. Surely this is all wrong. In our
physical life we are least conscious of those functions that are most vital
and continuous, and the more perfectly they do their work the less we think
about them. The analogy is incomplete and must be drawn with care. But when
you have conceded that faith has to be acquired, that it has to be learned,
there is still this much in the analogy. If faith is a long and hard
lesson, the value of the lesson to us is not the effort with which we learn
it, but the ease with which we apply it. The measure of conscious effort in
our faith is the measure of our faith's weakness. When faith has become a
spontaneity of our character, when it turns to God instinctively, when it
does its work with the involuntariness of habit, then it has become strong.
_Pour out your heart before Him._ How this singer understood the office and
privilege of the 'all times' trust! He knew that there is a fullness of
heart that is ill to bear. True, in more than one simple way the full heart
can find some slight relief. There is work. The full heart can go out and
do something. There is a brother's trouble in which a man may partly forget
his own. There is sympathy. Surely few are so lonely that they cannot find
any one ready to offer the gift of the listening ear, any one willing to
share with them all of pain and burden that can be shared. Ah! but what of
that which cannot be shared? What of the sorrow that has no language, and
the shame and confusion that we would not, and even dare not, trail across
a friend's mind? So often the heart holds more than ever should be poured
out into another's ear. There are in life strained silences that we could
not break if we would. And there is a law of reticence that true love and
unselfishness will always respect. If my brother hath joy, am I to cloud it
with my grief? If he hath sorrow, am I to add my sorrow unto his? When our
precious earthly fellowship has been put to its last high uses in the hour
of sorrow or shame, the heart has still a burden for which this world finds
no relief. But there is another fellowship. There is God our Father. There
is the ear of Heaven. We may be girt with silence among our fellows, but in
looking up the heart finds freedom. In His Presence the voice of confession
can break through the gag of shame, and the pent-up tide of trouble can let
itself break upon the heart of Eternal Love.
_God is a refuge for us._ That is the great discovery of faith. That is the
merciful word that comes to be written so plainly in the life that has
formed the habit of faith. God our refuge. It may be that to some the word
'refuge' suggests the occasional rather than the constant need of life. But
the refuge some day and the faith every day are linked together. A thing is
no use to you if you cannot find it when you want it. And you cannot find
it easily if it be not at hand. The peasant built his cottage under the
shadow of his lord's castle walls. In the hour of peril it was but a step
to the strong fortress. 'Trust in Him at all times.' Build your house under
the walls of the Eternal Help. Live in the Presence. Find the attitude of
faith, and the act of faith will be simple. Trust in Him through every
hour, and when a tragic hour comes one step shall take you into the
innermost safety.
III.
THE ONE THING DESIRABLE
One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will
I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of
the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the
beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in His temple.
Ps. xxvii. 4.
_I have desired ... I will seek._ Amid the things that are seen, desire and
quest are nearly always linked closely together. The man who desires money
seeks after money. The desire of the world is often disappointed, but it is
rarely supine. It is dynamic. It leads men. True, it leads them astray; but
that is a reflection on its wisdom and not on its effectiveness. Among what
we rightly call the lower things men do not play with their desires, they
obey them. But amid the unseen realities of life it is often quite
otherwise. In the religious life desire is sometimes strangely ineffective.
It is static, if that be not a contradiction in terms. In many a life-story
it stands written: One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I dream
of, that will I hope for, that will I wait for. Many things help to explain
this attitude, and, explaining it, they condemn it also. We allow our
surroundings to pass judgement on our longings. We bring the eternal to the
bar of the hour, and postpone the verdict. Or it may be in the worldliness
of our hearts we admit the false plea of urgency and the false claim of
authority made by our outward life. And perhaps more commonly the soul
lacks the courage of its desires. It costs little to follow a desire that
goes but a little way, and that on the level of familiar effort and within
sight of familiar things. It is another thing to hear the call of the
mountains and to feel the fascination of some far and glittering peak. That
is a call to perilous and painful effort. And yet again, high desire
sometimes leaves life where it found it because the heart attaches an
intrinsic value to vision. It is something to have _seen_ the Alpine
heights of possibility. Yes, it is something, but what is it? It is a
golden hour to the man who sets out to the climb; it is an hour of shame
and judgement, hereafter to be manifest, to the man who clings to the
comforts of the valley.
_One thing have I desired._ When a man speaks thus unto us, we have a right
to ponder his words with care. We naturally become profoundly interested,
expectant, and, to the limit of our powers, critical. If a man has seen one
thing that he can call simply and finally the desire of his heart, it ought
to be worth looking at. We expect something large, lofty, inclusive. And we
find this: '_That I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my
life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in His temple._' Let
us examine this desire, And, first of all, we must free our minds from mere
literalism. If we do not, we shall find in this desire many things that are
not in it, and miss everything that is in it. This is not the longing for a
cloistered life, the confession of one who is weary of this heavy world,
doubtful of its promises and afraid of its powers. 'The house of the Lord'
is not a place, but a state, not an edifice, but an attitude. It is a fair
and unseen dwelling-place builded by the hands of God to be the home, here
and hereafter, of all the hearts that purely love and worship Him. We read
of one who, a day's march from his father's house, lay down and slept; and
in his sleep God spake to him, and lo, out in a wild and lonely place,
Jacob said, 'This is none other but the house of God.' For every one to
whom the voice of God has come, and who has listened to that voice and
believed in its message, the mountains and valleys of this fair world, the
breath of every morning and the hush of every evening, are instinct with a
Presence. Wordsworth dwelt in the house of the Lord all the days of his
life. And if the wonder and beauty of the earth lift up our hearts unto our
God in praise and worship, we dwell there also.
Yes, but this world is a world of men. In city or on hillside the great
persistent fact for us, the real setting of our life, is not nature, but
humanity. Life is not a peaceful vision of earthly beauty. Our experience
is not a dreamy pastoral. There are shamed and broken lives. The world is
full of greed and hate and warfare and sorrow. Nature at its best cannot by
itself build for us a temple that humanity at its worst, or even at
something less than its worst, cannot pull down about our ears. For the
Psalmist, probably David himself, the temple was symbolic of all heavenly
realities. It stood for the holiness and the nearness and the mercy of God,
and for the sacredness and the possibility of human life. In the light and
power and perfect assurance of these things he desired to dwell all the
days of his life. For us there is the life and word of One greater than the
temple. Jesus of Nazareth dwelt in the house of the Lord. Between Him and
God the Father there was perfect union. And no one ever saw the worth of
human life as Jesus saw it. And no one ever measured the sacred values of
humanity as He measured them. And now, in the perfect mercy of God, there
is no man but may dwell in the house of God alway and feel life's
sacredness amidst a thousand desecrations, and know its preciousness amidst
all that seeks to obscure, defile, and cheapen it.
_To behold the beauty of the Lord._ It is only in the house of the Lord,
the unseen fane of reverence, trust, and communion, that a man can learn
what beauty is, and where to look for it. Out in the world beauty is held
to be a sporadic thing. It is like a flower growing where no one expected a
blossom. It is an unrelated and unexplained surprise. It is a green oasis
in the desert of unlovely and unpromising things. But for the dweller in
the house of the Lord beauty is not on this wise. Said one such dweller,
'The desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose.' He looked across the
leagues of burning sand and saw the loveliness of Carmel by the sea, and of
Sharon where the lilies grow. To the artist beauty is an incident, to the
saint beauty is a law of life. It is the thing that is to be. It is the
positive purpose, throbbing and yearning and struggling in the whole
universe. When it emerges and men behold it, they behold the face of truth;
and if it emerges not, it is still there, the fundamental fact and the
vital issue of human life. To dwell in the Divine Presence by faith and
obedience; to live so near to God that you can see all about yourself and
every human soul the real means of life, and straight before you the real
end of life; to know that though so often the worst is man's dark choice,
yet ever the best is his true heritage; and to learn to interpret the whole
of life in the terms of God's saving purpose,--this is to behold the beauty
of the Lord.
_And to inquire in His temple._ The Psalmist desired for himself an inward
attitude before God that should not only reveal unto him the eternal
fitness of all God's ways and the eternal grace of all His purposes, but
should also put him in the way of solving the various problems that arise
to try the wisdom and strength of men's lives. Sometimes the first court of
appeal in life, and always the last, is the temple court. When all the
world is dumb, a voice speaks to them that worship. Reverential love never
loses its bearings. In this world we need personal and social guidance, and
there must be many times when both shall be wanting unless we have learned
to carry the burden of our ignorance to the feet of the Eternal Wisdom. And
perhaps a man can desire no better thing for himself than that the
reverence and devotion of his life should be such as to make the appeal to
God's perfect arbitrament an easy thing.
IV.
EYES AND FEET
Mine eyes are ever toward the Lord,
For He shall pluck my feet out of the net.
Ps. xxv. 15.
In any man's life a great deal depends upon outlook. In some ways we
recognize this fact. We do not by choice live in a house whose windows
front a blank wall. A little patch of green grass, a tree, a peep of sky,
or even the traffic of a busy street--anything rather than a blank wall.
That is a sound instinct, but it ought to go deeper than it sometimes does.
This outlook and aspect question is important when you are building a
house, but it is vastly more important when you are building a character.
The soul has eyes. The deadliest monotony is that of a dull soul. Life is a
poor affair for any man who looks out upon the blind walls of earthly
circumstance and necessity, and cannot see from his soul's dwelling-place
the pink flush of the dawn that men call hope, and who has no garden where
he may grow the blossoms of faith and sweet memory, the fair flowers of
holy human trusts and fellowships. Only the divinity of life can deliver us
from the monotony of living. 'Mine eyes are ever toward the Lord.' This man
has an infinite outlook. It matters not whether he looked out through
palace windows or lived in the meanest house in Jerusalem's city. It is the
eye that makes the view. This man had a fairer prospect than ever man had
who looked seaward from Carmel or across the valleys from the steeps of
Libanus. It was his soul that claimed the prospect. From the window of the
little house of life he saw the light of God lying on the everlasting
hills. That is the real deliverance from the monotony of things. The man
who is weary of life is the man who has not seen it. The man who is tied to
his desk sometimes thinks everything would be right if only he could
travel. But many a man has done the Grand Tour and come back no better
contented. You cannot fool your soul with Mont Blanc or even the Himalayas.
So many thousand feet, did you say?--but what is that to infinity! The cure
for the fretful soul is not to go _round_ the world; it is to get _beyond_
it.
_Mine eyes are ever toward the Lord._ That is the view we want. We gaze
contemptuously on the little one-story lodge just inside the park gates,
and fail to get a glimpse of the magnificent mansion, with its wealth of
adornment and treasure, that lies a mile among the trees. No wonder that
men grow discontented or contemptuous when they mistake the porch for the
house. If a man would understand himself and discover his resources and put
his hand on all life's highest uses, he must look out and up unto his God.
Then he comes to know that sunrise and sunset, and the beauty of the earth,
and child-life and old age, and duty and sorrow, and all else that life
holds, are linked to the larger life of an eternal world.
That is the true foresight. They called him a far-seeing man. How did he
get that name? Well, he made a fortune. He managed to make use of the ebb
and flow of the market, and never once got stranded. He was shrewd and did
some good guessing, and now, forsooth, they say he is 'very far-seeing.'
But he has not opened his Bible for years, and the fountains of sympathy
are dried up in his soul. He can see as far into the money column as most
men, but the financial vista is not very satisfying for those who see it
best. The Gospel of St. John is a sealed book to him, and that is in God's
handwriting and opens the gates of heaven. Far-seeing? Why, the man is in a
tiny cell, and he is going blind. 'Mine eyes are ever toward the Lord.'
That is the far-sighted man. He can see an ever larger life opening out
before him. He can see the glory of the eternal righteousness beneath his
daily duties and the wonder of eternal love in the daily fellowships and
fulfilments of the brotherhood. This is measuring life by the heavenly
measurement. This is the vision we need day by day and at the end of the
days. For interest in some things must wane, and life must become less
responsive to all that lies about it, and many an earthly link is broken
and many an earthly window is darkened, and the old faces and old ways
pass, and the thing the old man cherishes is trodden under foot by the
impetuous tread of a new generation, and desire fails. Then it is well with
him whose eyes have already caught glimpses of 'the King in His beauty,'
and 'the land that is very far off.'
But think for a moment of the present value of the divine outlook upon
life. It brings guidance and deliverance. Set side by side the two
expressions 'eyes unto the Lord,' and 'feet out of the net.' Life is more
than a vision; it is a pilgrimage. We see the far white peaks whereon rests
the glory of life, but reaching them is not a matter of eyes, but of feet.
Here, maybe, the real problem of godly living presents itself to us. Here
our Christian idealism lays a burden on us. It is possible to see distances
that would take days to traverse. Even so we can see heights of spiritual
possibility that we shall not reach while the light holds good unless we
foot it bravely. And it is not an easy journey. There are so many snares
set for the pilgrims of faith and hope. There are subtle silken nets woven
of soft-spun deceits and filmy threads of sin; and there are coarse strong
nets fashioned by the strong hands of passion and evil desire. There are
nets of doubt and pain and weakness. But think of the man whose eyes were
ever towards the Lord. He came through all right. He always does. He always
will. He looked steadily upward to his God. When we get into the net we
yield to the natural tendency to look down at our feet. We try to discover
how the net is made. We delude ourselves with the idea that if only we take
time we shall be able to extricate ourselves; but it always means getting
further entangled. It is a waste of time to study the net. Life is ever
weaving for us snares too intricate for us to unravel and too strong for us
to break. God alone understands how they are made and how they may be
broken. He does not take us round the net or over it, but He does not leave
us fast by the feet in the midst of it. He always brings a man out on the
heavenward side of the earthly difficulty. Look upward and you are bound to
go forward.
V.
THE SAFEGUARDED SOUL
The Lord shall keep thee from all evil;
He shall keep thy soul.
Ps. cxxi. 7.
One of the great offices of religion is to help men to begin at the
beginning. If you wish to straighten out a tangle of string, you know that
it is worth your while to look patiently for one of the ends. If you make
an aimless dash at it the result is confusion worse confounded, and
by-and-by the tangle is thrown down in despair, its worst knots made by the
hands that tried in a haphazard way to simplify it. Life is that tangle;
and religion, if it does not loosen all the knots and straighten all the
twists, at least shows us where the two ends are. They are with God and the
soul. God deals with a man's soul. We cannot explain the facts of our
experience or the fashion of our circumstance save in as far as we can see
these things reflected in our character. The true spiritual philosophy of
life begins its inquiry in the soul, and works outward into all the
puzzling mass of life's details. And the foundation of such a philosophy is
not experience, but faith. It is true that experience often confirms faith,
but faith interprets experience. Experience asks more questions than it can
answer. It collects more facts than it can explain. It admits of many
different constructions being put upon it. It puts us first of all into
touch with the problem of life rather than the solution. If the gentle,
patient words of the saint are the utterance of one who has suffered, so
also are the bitter protests of the disappointed worldling. The fashion of
the experience may be the same in each case. It is faith that makes the
lesson different. It is a want of faith that makes us expect the lower in
life to explain the higher, the outward to shed light upon the inward. We
pluck with foolish, aimless fingers at this strange tangle of human life.
We judge God's way with us as far as we can see it, and we think we have
got to the end of it. We draw our shallow conclusions. Faith teaches us
that God's way with us is a longer and a deeper way, and the end of that
way is down in the depths of our spirit, hidden in the love of our
character. It is not here and now. It is in what we shall be if God have
His will with us.
All the true definitions of things are written in the soul. It was here
that the Psalmist found his definition of evil. 'The Lord shall keep thee
from all evil; He shall keep thy soul.' Then evil is something that
threatens the soul. It is not material, but spiritual. It is not in our
circumstances themselves, but in their effect upon the inward life. The
same outward conditions of life may be good or evil according to their
influence on our character. Good and evil are not qualities of things. They
have no meaning apart from the soul. The world says that health and wealth
are good, and that sickness and poverty are evil. If that were true the
line that separates the healthy from the sick, the rich from the poor,
would also separate the happy from the miserable. But we find joy and
sorrow on both sides of that line. We are drawn to look deeper than this
for our definition of good and evil. We have to make the soul the final
arbiter amid these conflicting voices. Here we must find the true
definition of evil. The first question we ask when we hear of a house
having been burnt down is this: 'Was there any loss of life?' All else lies
on a vastly lower plane of interest and importance. So must we learn to
distinguish between the house of circumstance, or the house of the body,
and the soul that dwells in it. The only real loss is the 'loss of life,'
the loss of any of these inner things that go to make the soul's strength
and treasure. The man who has lost everything except faith and hope has,
maybe, lost nothing at all. There are some among the pilgrims of faith
to-day who would never have been found there had not God cast upon their
shoulders the ragged cloak of poverty; and if you know anything about that
band of pilgrims you will know that the man who outstrips his companions is
often a man who is lame on both his feet.
O sceptic world, this is the final answer to your scepticism, an answer
none the less true because you cannot receive it: _The Lord keepeth the
souls of His saints._ Have you not seen men thinning out a great tree,
cutting off some of its noblest branches and marring its splendid symmetry?
And very likely you have felt it was a great shame to do so. But that work
of maiming and spoiling meant light and sunshine and air in a close and
darkened room. It meant health to the dwellers in the house over which the
tree had cast its shadow. It is much to have tall and stately trees in the
garden of life. But by-and-by that great oak of vigour begins to darken the
windows of faith, and God lops some of the branches. We call it suffering,
but it means more light. Or it may be that those firs of lordly ambition
have grown taller than the roof-tree, and God sends forth His storm-wind to
lay them low. We call it failure, but it means a better view of the stars.
Ah, yes, we are over-anxious about the trees in the garden. God cares most
of all that the light of His truth and the warmth of His love and the
breath of His Spirit shall reach and fill every room in the house of life.
_He shall keep thy soul._ That is a promise that can fold us in divine
comfort and peace, and that can do something towards interpreting for us
every coil of difficulty, every hour of pain. But if this is to be so, we
must ourselves be true to the view of life the promise gives us. We must
think of the soul as God thinks of it. We live in a world where souls are
cheap. They are bought and sold day by day. It is strange beyond all
understanding that the only thing many a man is not afraid of losing is the
one thing that is really worth anything to him--his soul. Sometimes the
lusts of the world drag down our heart's desire, and we have to confess
with shame to moments in our experience when we have not been at all
concerned with what became of our soul so long as the desire of the hour
was fulfilled or satisfied. We need to seek day by day that the masterful
and abiding desires of our heart may be set upon undying good, and that our
aspiration may never fold its wings and rest on anything lower than the
highest. This shall not make dreamers of us. It shall stand us in good
stead in the thick of the world. The man who gets 'the best of the bargain'
is always the man who is most honest; for the most precious thing that a
man stands to win or lose in any deal is the cleanness of his soul. The man
who gets the best of the argument is always the man who is most truthful;
for a quiet conscience is better than a silenced opponent. The man who gets
the best of life is the man who keeps the honour of his soul; for Jesus
said: 'What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his
own soul?'
So then, amid the manifold uncertainties of human life and the
ever-changing forms and complexions of human experience, one thing is
pledged beyond all doubt to every man who seeks the will of God and the
promise for the safeguarding of his soul. He may write this at the top of
every page in the book of life. He may take it for his light in dark days,
his comfort in sad days, his treasure in empty days. He may have it on his
lips in the hour of battle and in his heart in the day of disappointment.
He may meet his temptations with it, interpret his sufferings with it,
build his ideal with it. And it shall come to pass that he shall learn to
look with untroubled eyes upon the outward things of life, nor fear the
touch of its thousand grasping hands, knowing that his soul is in the hands
of One who can keep it safe in all the world's despite, even God Himself.
VI.
A PLEA FOR TEARS
They that sow in tears shall reap in joy.
He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed,
Shall doubtless come again with rejoicing,
Bringing his sheaves with him.
Ps. cxxvi. 5, 6.
It is almost impossible to recall the joys and sorrows of life without
having some thought of their compensative relation. We set our bright days
against our dark days. We weigh our successes against our failures. When
the hour through which we are living is whispering a bitter message, we
recall the kindlier messages of other hours and say that we have much for
which we ought to be thankful. And such a deliberate handling of
experience, such a quiet adjustment of memories, is not without its uses.
Any view of life that will save a man from whining is worth taking. Any
reckoning that will prevent a man from indulging in self-pity--that
subtlety of selfishness--is worth making. There is, moreover, something
very simple and obvious in this way of thinking and judging. To make one
kind of experience deal with another kind, to set the days and the hours in
battle array--or shall we say to arrange a tourney where some
gaily-caparisoned and well-mounted Yesterday is set to tilt with a
black-visored and silent To-day--is a way of dealing with life which seems
to have much to commend it. But it has at the best serious limitations, and
at the worst it may issue in a tragedy. The wrong knight may be unhorsed.
The award may go to him of the black plume. Pitting one experience against
another has gone to the making of many a cynic and not a few despairing
souls. The compensative interpretation of joy and sorrow may bring an
answer of peace to a man's soul, or it may not. But in this matter we are
dealing with things in which we cannot afford to risk an equivocal or a
despairing answer. We must win in every encounter. It is not an hour's joy,
but a life's outlook that is at stake. No hour's fight was ever worth
fighting if it was fought for the sake of the hour. The moments are ever
challenging the eternal, the swift and busy hours fling their gauntlets at
the feet of the ageless things. The real battle of life is never between
yesterday and to-day; it is always between to-day and the Forever.
To isolate an experience is to misinterpret it. We may even completely
classify experiences, and yet completely misunderstand experience. To
understand life at all we must get beyond the incidental and the
alternating. Life is not a series of events charged with elements of
contrast, contradiction, or surprise. It is a deep, coherent, and
unfaltering process. And one feels that it was something more than the
chance of the moment that led the singer of old to weave the tears and the
rejoicings of men's lives into a figure of speech that stands for unity of
process, even the figure of the harvest.
_They that sow in tears shall reap in joy._ The sweep of golden grain is
not some arbitrary compensation for the life of the seed cast so lavishly
into the ground, and biding the test of darkness and cold. It is the very
seed itself fulfilled of all its being. Even so it is with the sorrows of
these hearts of ours and the joy unto which God bringeth us. He does not
fling us a few glad hours to atone for the hours wherein we have suffered
adversity. There is a deep sense in which the joys of life are its ripened
sorrows.
_They that sow in tears.... He that goeth forth and weepeth._ These are not
the few who have been haunted by apparent failure, or beset with outwardly
painful conditions of service. They are not those who have walked in the
shadow of a lost leader, or toiled in the grey loneliness of a lost comrade
or of a brother proved untrue. For apparent failure, outward difficulty and
loneliness, often as we may have to face them, are, after all, only the
accidents of Godward toil. And if the bearer of seed for God's great
harvest should go forth to find no experience of these things, still, if he
is to do any real work in the fields of the Lord, he must go forth weeping.
He must sow in tears. Let a man be utterly faithful and sincere, let him
open his heart without reserve to the two great claims of the ideal and
sympathy, and he shall come to know that he has not found the hidden
meaning of daily service, nor learned how he can best perform that service,
until he has tasted the sorrow at the heart of it. The tears that are the
pledge of harvest are not called to the eyes by ridicule or opposition.
They are not the tears of disappointment, vexation, or impotence. They are
tears that dim the eyes of them that see visions, and gather in the heart
of them that dream dreams. To see the glory of God in the face of Jesus
Christ and the blindness of the world's heart to that glory; to see
unveiled the beauty that should be, and, unveiled too, the shame that is;
to have a spiritual nature that thrills at the touch of the perfect love
and life, and responds to every note of pain borne in upon it from the
murmurous trouble of the world,--this is to have inward fitness for the
high work of the Kingdom. Yes, and it is the pledge that this work shall be
done. There is such a thing as artistic grief. There is the vain and
languorous pity of aestheticism. Its robe of sympathy is wrapped about
itself and bejewelled with its own tears. And it never goes forth. You
never meet it in 'the darkness of the terrible streets.'
_He that goeth forth and weepeth._ It is his tears that cause him to go
forth. It is his sorrow that will not let him rest. True pity is a mighty
motive. When the real abiding pathos of life has gripped a man's heart, you
will find him afield doing the work of the Lord. You will not see his
tears. There will be a smile in his eyes and, maybe, a song on his lips.
For the sorrow and the joy of service dwell side by side in a man's life.
Indeed, they often seem to him to be but one thing. It were a mistake to
refer the whole meaning of the words about a man's coming 'again with
rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him' to some far day when the reapers
of God shall gather the last great harvest of the world. Through his tears
the sower sees the harvest. Through all his life there rings many a sweet
prophetic echo of the harvest home.
_He that goeth forth and weepeth._ No man ever wept like that and went not
forth, but some go forth who have not wept. And they go forth to certain
failure. They mishandle life, and with good intent do harm. But that is not
the worst thing to be said about these toilers without tears. It is not
that they touch life so unskilfully, but they touch so little of it. It is
only through his tears that a man sees what his work is and where it lies.
Tearless eyes are purblind. We have yet much to learn about the real needs
of the world. So many try very earnestly to deal with situations they have
never yet really seen. For the uplifting of men and for the great social
task of this our day we need ideas, and enthusiasm, and all sorts of
resource; but most of all, and first of all, we need vision. And the man
who goes farthest, and sees most, and does most, is 'he that goeth forth
and weepeth.'
VII.
DELIVERANCE WITH HONOUR
He shall call upon Me, and I will answer him;
I will be with him in trouble:
I will deliver him, and honour him.
With long life will I satisfy him,
And show him My salvation.
Ps. xci. 15, 16.
_He shall call upon Me._ He shall need Me. He shall not be able to live
without Me. As the years pass over his head he shall learn that there is
one need woven into human life larger and deeper and more abiding than any
other need--and that need is God. Thus doth divinity prophesy concerning
humanity. Thus doth infinite foresight predict a man's need.
We peer in our purblind fashion into the future and try to anticipate our
needs. We fence ourselves in with all sorts of fancied securities, and then
we comfort ourselves with the shrewdness and completeness of our
forecasting and provision-making. And sometimes it is just folly with a
grave face. 'He shall call upon Me.' A man has learned nothing until he has
learned that he needs God. And we take a long time over that lesson. It has
sometimes to be beaten into us--written in conscience and heart by the
finger of pain. How the little storehouse of life has to be almost stripped
of its treasures, how our faith in the things of the hour has to be played
with and mocked, ere we call upon God in heaven to fill us with abiding
treasure and fold us in eternal love.
_He shall call upon Me, and, I will answer him._ But I have called, says
one, and He has not answered. I called upon Him when my little child was
sick unto death, and, spite my calling, the little white soul fluttered
noiselessly into the great beyond. My friend, you call that tiny green
mound in the churchyard God's silence. Some day you will call it God's
answer. Our prayers are sometimes torn out of our hearts by the pain of the
moment. God's answers come forth from the unerring quiet of eternity. 'He
shall call upon Me.' 'He shall ask Me to help him, but he does not know how
he can be helped. He is hedged about by a thousand limitations of thought.
His life is full of distortions. He cannot distinguish between a blessing
and a curse. I cannot heed the dictations of his prayers, but I will answer
him.' This is the voice of Him to whom the ravelled complexities of men's
minds are simplicity itself; who dwells beyond the brief bewilderments and
mistaken desirings and false ideals of men's hearts.
Oh these divine answers! How they confuse us! It is their perfection that
bewilders us; it is their completeness that carries them beyond our
comprehension.
There is the stamp of the local and the temporary on all our asking. The
answer that comes is wider than life and longer than time, and fashioned
after a completeness whereof we do not even dream.
_I will be with him in trouble._ Trouble is that in life which becomes to
us a gospel of tears, a ministry of futility. This is because we have
grasped the humanity of the word and missed the divinity of it. We are
always doing that. Always gathering the meaning of the moments and missing
the meaning of the years. Always smarting under the sharp discipline and
missing the merciful design: 'With Him in trouble.' That helps me to
believe in my religion. Trouble is the test of the creeds. A fig for the
orthodoxy that cannot interpret tears! Write vanity upon the religion that
is of no avail in the house of sorrow. When the earthly song falls on
silence we are disposed to call it a pitiable silence. Not so. Let us say a
divinely opportune silence, for when the many voices grow dumb the One
Voice speaks: 'I will be with him in trouble,' and the man who has lost the
everything that is nothing only to find the one thing that is all knows
what that promise means.
_I will deliver him._ What a masterful, availing, victorious presence is
this! How this promise goes out beyond our human ministries of consolation!
How often the most we can do is to walk by our brother's side whilst he
bears a burden we cannot share! How often the earthly sympathy is just a
communion of sad hearts--one weak hand holding another! 'I will deliver
him.' That is not merely sympathy, it is victory. The divine love does not
merely condole, it delivers.
You cannot add anything to this promise. It is complete. The time of the
deliverance is there, the manner of it is there, the whole ministry of help
is there. You say you cannot find anything about time and manner. You can
only find the bare promise of deliverance. My friend, there are no bare
promises in the lips of the Heavenly Father. In the mighty, merciful
leisure of omnipotence, in the perfect fitness of things, in a way wiser
than his thinking and better than his hoping and larger than his prayer, 'I
will deliver him.'
_And honour him._ It will be no scanty, obscure, uncertain deliverance.
There shall be light in it, glory in it. The world battles with its
troubles and seems sometimes to be successful, until we see how those
troubles have shaken its spirit and twisted its temper; and see, too, how
much of the beautiful and the strong and the sweet has been lost in the
fight. 'I will deliver him' with an abundant and an honourable
deliverance--he shall come forth from his tribulations more noble, tender,
and self-possessed. Hereafter there shall be given him the honour of one
whom the stress of life has driven into the arms of God.