THE SHUTTING OF DOORS.
"Never delay
To do the duty which the hour brings,
Whatever it be in great or smaller things;
For who doth know
What he shall do the coming day?"
The shutting of a door is a little thing and yet it may have infinite
meaning. It may fix a destiny for weal or for woe. When God shut the
door of the ark the sound of its closing was the knell of exclusion to
those who were without, but it was the token of security to the little
company of trusting ones who were within. When the door was shut upon
the bridegroom and his friends who had gone into the festal hall, thus
sheltering them from the night's darkness and danger, and shutting them
in with joy and gladness, there were those outside to whose hearts the
closing of that door smote despair and woe. To them it meant hopeless
exclusion from all the privileges of those who were within and exposure
to all the sufferings and perils from which those favored ones were
protected.
Here we have hints of what may come from the closing of a door. Life
is full of illustrations. We are continually coming up to doors which
stand open for a little while and then are shut. An artist has tried
to teach this in a picture. Father Time is there with inverted
hour-glass. A young man is lying at his ease on a luxurious couch,
while beside him is a table spread with rich fruits and viands.
Passing by him toward an open door are certain figures which represent
opportunities; they come to invite the young man to nobleness, to
manliness, to usefulness, to worth. First is a rugged, sun-browned
form, carrying a flail. This is labor. He invites the youth to toil.
He has already passed far by unheeded. Next is a philosopher, with
open book, inviting the young man to thought and study, that he may
master the secrets in the mystic volume. But this opportunity, too, is
disregarded. The youth has no desire for learning. Close behind the
philosopher comes a woman with bowed form, carrying a child. Her dress
betokens widowhood and poverty. Her hand is stretched out appealingly.
She craves charity. Looking closely at the picture we see that the
young man holds money in his hand. But he is clasping it tightly, and
the poor widow's pleading is in vain. Still another figure passes,
endeavoring to lure and woo him from his idle ease. It is the form of
a beautiful woman, who seeks by love to awaken in him noble purposes,
worthy of his powers, and to inspire him for ambitious efforts. One by
one these opportunities have passed, with their calls and invitations,
only to be unheeded. At last he is arousing to seize them, but it is
too late; they are vanishing from sight and the door is closing.
This is a true picture of what is going on all the time in this world.
Opportunities come to every young person, offering beautiful things,
rich blessings, brilliant hopes. Too often, however, these offers and
solicitations are rejected and one by one pass by, to return no more.
Door after door is shut, and at last men stand at the end of their
days, with beggared lives, having missed all that they might have
gotten of enrichment and good from the passing days.
Take home. A true Christian home, with its love and prayer and all its
gentle influences, is almost heaven to a child. The fragrance of the
love of Christ fills all the household life. Holiness is in the very
atmosphere. The benedictions of affection make every day tender with
its impressiveness. In all life there come no other such opportunities
for receiving lovely things into the life, and learning beautiful
lessons, as in the days of childhood and youth that are spent in a home
of Christian love. Yet how often are all these influences resisted and
rejected. Then by and by the door is shut. The heart that made the
home is still in death. The gentle hand that wrought such blessing is
cold. Many a man in mid-life would give all he has to creep back for
one hour to the old sacred place, to hear again his mother's voice in
counsel or in prayer, to feel once more the gentle touch of her hand
and to have her sweet comfort. But it is too late. The door is shut.
Take education. Many young people fail to realize what golden
opportunities come to them in their school-days. Too often they make
little of the privileges they then enjoy. They sometimes waste in
idleness the hours they ought to spend in diligent study and helpful
reading. They might, if they would, fit themselves for high and
honorable places in after years; but they let the days pass with their
opportunities. By and by they hear the school door shut. Then, all
through their years they move with halting step, with dwarfed life,
with powers undeveloped, unable to accept the higher places that might
have been theirs if they had been prepared for them, failing often in
duties and responsibilities--all because in youth they wasted their
school-days and did not seize the opportunities that then came to them
for preparation. Napoleon, when visiting his old school, said to the
pupils, "Boys, remember that every hour wasted at school means a chance
of misfortune in future life." Thousands of failures along the years
of manhood and womanhood attest the truth of this monition.
Friendship is another opportunity that offers great blessing. Before
every young person stand two kinds of friends, ever reaching out a
beckoning hand. The one class whisper of pleasures that lead to sin
and debasement. They offer the young man the wine-glass, the
gambling-table, the gratification of lust and passion. They offer the
young woman flattery, gay dress, the dance, pleasures that will tarnish
her womanly purity. We all know the end of such friendship.
But there is another class of friends who stand before young people,
wooing them to noble things. They may be plain, perhaps homely, almost
stern in their earnestness of purpose and in the seriousness with which
they talk of life. They call to toil, to diligence, to self-denial, to
heroic qualities of character, to purity, to usefulness, to "whatsoever
things are true, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are
honorable, whatsoever things are lovely." It is impossible to
overstate the value of the blessings that true, wise, and worthy
friendship offers to the young. It seeks to incite and stimulate them
to their best in character and achievement. It would lift them up to
lofty attainment, to splendid victoriousness. The young people to whom
comes the offer of such friendship are most highly favored.
But how often do we see the blessing rejected for the solicitation of
mere idle pleasures that bring no true good, that entangle the life in
all manner of complications, that lead into the ways of temptation, and
that too often end in disaster and sorrow.
There is a time for the choosing of friends, and when that time is
passed and the choice has been made, the door is shut. Then it is too
late to go back. There are many people in mid-life, bound now in the
chains of evil companionships, who would give all they have for the
sweet delights and pure pleasures of friendship which once might have
been theirs, which in youth reached out to them in vain white hands of
importunity and blessing. But it is too late; the door is shut.
So it is with the opportunities of doing good to others, comforting,
helping, cheering, lightening burdens, giving gladness and joy. We
stand continually before open doors which we do not enter. Ofttimes we
shrink with timid feeling from the sweet ministry, holding back the
sympathetic word or restraining ourselves from the doing of the gentle
kindness, thinking our proffer of love might be unwelcome. Or we do
not perceive the opportunity to give a blessing. This is true very
often, especially in the closer and more tender intimacies of life. We
do not recognize the heart-hunger in our loved ones, and we walk with
them day by day, failing to help them in the thousand ways in which we
might help them, until they are gone from us and the door is shut.
Then all we can do is to bear the pain of regret, having only the hope
that in some way in the life beyond, we may be able to pay--though so
late--love's debt.
"How will it be
When you at last in heaven we see--
Dear souls, whose footsteps in lost days
Made musical earth's toil-worn ways,
While we not half the loneliness
That bound you to our side could guess?
Where angels know your footfall we
Are fain to be.
"We never knew--
So heedlessly we walked with you--
The drops we jostled from your cup,
That spilt, could not be gathered up;
We might have given you foam and glow
From our own beaker's overflow;
Ah! what we might have been to you
We never knew.
"We might have lent
Such strength, such comfort and content
To you, out of our ample store;
We might have hastened on before
To lift the shadows from your way,
Darkened, ere noon, to twilight's gray;
With earth's chilled air love's warm heart-scent
We might have blent.
"Dear, wistful eyes,
Ye haunt us with your kind surprise,
Your tender wonder that a heart
Should thus be left alone, apart,
So loving, so misunderstood
By us, in our self-centred mood:
Alas! in vain to you arise
Our longing cries.
"Oh, will you wait
For us beyond the shining gate?
Though lovely gifts behind you left,
We want yourselves; we are bereft.
From your new mansion glorious
Will you lean out to look for us?
Shut is the far-off, shining gate--
Are we too late?"
These are but illustrations. The same is true in all phases of life.
Every day doors are opened for us which we do not enter. For a little
time they stand open with bidding and welcome, and then they are
closed, to be opened no more forever. To every one of us along our
years there come opportunities, which, if accepted and improved, would
fit us for worthy character, and for noble, useful living, and lead us
in due time to places of honor and blessing. But how many of us there
are who reject these opportunities and lose the good they brought for
us from God! Then one by one the doors are shut, cutting off the
proffered favors while we go on unblessed.
There is another closing of doors which is even sadder than any of
those which have been suggested. There is a shutting of our own
heart's door upon God himself. He stands at our gate and knocks and
there are many who never open to him at all, and many more who open the
door but slightly. The latter, while they may receive blessing, yet
miss the fulness of divine revealing which would flood their souls with
love; the former miss altogether the sweetest benediction of life.
"He that shuts Love out in turn shall be
Shut out from Love, and on his threshhold lie
Howling in outer darkness. Nor for this
Was common clay made from the common earth,
Moulded by God and tempered with the tears
Of angels to the perfect shape of man."
This sad sound of closing doors, as it falls day after day upon our
soul's ears, proclaims to us continually that something which was ours,
which was sent to us from God, and for which we shall have to answer in
judgment, is ours no longer, is shut away forever from our grasp. It
is a sad picture--the five virgins standing at midnight before a closed
door through which they might have entered to great joy and honor, but
which to all their wild importunity will open no more. It is sad, yet
many of us are likewise standing before closed doors, doors that once
stood open to us, but into which we entered not, languidly loitering
outside until the sound of the shutting fell upon our ear as the knell
of hopeless exclusion:--
"Too late! Too late! Ye cannot enter now!"
Of course the past is irreparable and irrevocable, and it may seem idle
to vex ourselves in thinking about doors now closed, that no tears, no
prayers, no loud knockings, can ever open again. Yes; yet the future
remains. The years that are gone we cannot get back again, but new
years are yet before us. They too will have their open doors. Shall
we not learn wisdom as we look back upon the irrevocable past and make
sure that in the future we shall not permit God's doors of opportunity
to shut in our faces?