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 meditationsin the columns of the _Methodist Times_, which are here reprinted by thekind permission of the Editor, Dr. Scott Lidgett. The rare interest arousedby the previous publication of Mr. Ainsworth's sermons encourages the hopethat the present volume may find a place in the devotional literature towhich 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 HONOURVIII. 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 Hebrewphrase there lurks a symbolism that covers our whole experience. But let usjust now look at the most literal, and by no means the least true, interpretation of these words. One of the great dividing-lines in humanlife is the threshold-line. On one side of this line a man has his 'worldwithin the world, ' the sanctuary of love, the sheltered place of peace, thescene of life's most personal, sacred, and exclusive obligations. And onthe other side lies the larger life of mankind wherein also a man must takehis 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 thecall of labour and coming in to take the right to rest. And over us allevery hour there watches the Almighty Love. The division-lines in the lifeof man have nothing that corresponds to them in the love of God. We may behere 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 forththe Lord went with them, but it is more for men to say and know that samething 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, themerchant to his merchandise. There are still flocks and fields and markets, but where are the leisure, grace, and simplicity of life for him who hasany share in the world's work? Men go out to-day to face a life shadowed byvast industrial, commercial, and social problems. Life has growncomplicated, involved, hard to understand, difficult to deal with. Tension, conflict, subtlety, surprise, and amid it all, or over it all, a vastbrooding weariness that ever and again turns the heart sick. Oh the painsand the perils of the going out! There are elements of danger in modernlife that threaten all the world's toilers, whatever their work may be andwherever they may have to do it. There is the danger that always lurks in_things_--a warped judgement, a confused reckoning, a narrowed outlook. Itis so easily possible for a man to be at close grips with the world and yetto be ever more and more out of touch with its realities. The danger in theplaces 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 babelof the market-place that men need to fear; it is its silence. If we saythat we live only as we love, that we are strong only as we are pure, thatwe are successful only as we become just and good, the world into which wego forth does not deny these things--but it ignores them. And thus the realbattle of life is not the toil for bread. It is fought by all who wouldkeep alive and fresh in their hearts the truth that man doth not live bybread alone. For no man is this going out easy, for some it is at timesterrible, for all it means a need that only this promise avails tomeet--'The Lord shall keep thy going out. ' He shall fence thee about withthe ministry of His Spirit, and give thee grace to know, everywhere andalways, that thou art in this world to live for His kingdom of love andtruth and to grow a soul. 

_The Lord, shall keep . . . Thy coming in. _ It might seem to some that once aman was safely across the threshold of his home he might stand in less needof this promise of help. But experience says otherwise. The world haslittle respect for any man's threshold. It is capable of many a bold andshameless intrusion. The things that harass a man as he earns his treadsometimes haunt him as he eats it. No home is safe unless faith be thedoorkeeper. '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, asin the moil of the world, so also in the shelter of the place he named hisdwelling-place, peace and safety were not of his making, but of God'sgiving. 

Sometimes there is a problem and a pain waiting for a man across his ownthreshold. Many a man can more easily look upon the difficulties and perilsof the outer world than he can come in and look into the pain-lined face ofhis little child. If we cannot face alone the hostilities on one side ofour threshold we cannot face alone the intimacies on the other side of it. After all, life is whole and continuous. Whatever the changes in thesetting of life, there is no respite from living. And that means there isno leisure from duty, no rest from the service of obedience, no cessationin 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 aglimpse of its deeper application to our lives. The threshold of the homedoes not draw the truest division-line in life between the outward and theinward. Life is made up of thought and action, of the manifest things andthe hidden things. 

'Thy going out. ' That is, our life as it is manifest to others, as it haspoints of contact with the world about us. We must go out. We must take upsome attitude toward all other life. We must add our word to the long humanstory and our touch to the fashioning of the world. We need the pledge ofdivine help in that life of ours in which, for their good or ill, othersmust have a place and a part. 'And thy coming in'--into that uninvadedsanctum of thought. Did we say uninvaded? Not so. In that inner room oflife there sits Regret with her pale face, and Shame with dust on herforehead, and Memory with tears in her eyes. It is a pitiable thing attimes, is this our coming in. More than one man has consumed his life in aflame of activity because he could not abide the coming in. 'The Lord shallkeep . . . Thy coming in. ' That means help for every lonely, impotent, inwardhour of life. 

Look at the last word of this promise--'for evermore. ' Going out and comingin for evermore. I do not know how these words were interpreted when veryliteral meanings were attached to the parabolic words about the streets ofgold 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 ofmen's minds, and which is based on the growing sense of the continuity oflife. To offer a man an eternity of music-laden rest is to offer him a poorthing. He would rather have his going out and his coming in. Yes, and heshall 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 widervisions 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 atall times. _ Faith is not an act, but an attitude; not an event, but aprinciple; not a last resource, but the first and abiding necessity. It isthe constant factor in life's spiritual reckonings. It is theever-applicable and the ever-necessary. It is always in the high andlasting fitness of things. There are words that belong to hours or evenmoments, words that win their meaning from the newly created situation. Butfaith 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 deeproots of it and the wide range of it there is nothing like unto it in thewhole sweep of things spiritual. So the 'all times' trust is not for onemoment to be regarded as some supreme degree of faith unto which one hereand there may attain and which the rest can well afford to look upon as acounsel of perfection. This exhortation to trust in God at all timesconcerns 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 presentbecause 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 veryliterally a man of the moment--an opportunist, a gambler with the hours, afollower of the main chance. The moment makes him, and passing away unmakeshim. But the true man of the moment is the man to whom the moment is butone throb in the pulse of eternity. For him the moment does not stand outin splendid isolation. It is set in its place between that which hath beenand that which shall be. And its true significance is not something abidingin it, but something running through it. So is it in this great matter offaith. 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 befaith and becomes calculation. All faith is transcendent. It is independentof the conditions in which it has to live. It is not snared in the strangeweb of the tentative and the experimental. He that has for one moment feltthe power of faith has got beyond the dominion of time. 

_Trust in Him at all times. _ That is the only real escape from confusionand contradiction in the judgements we are compelled to pass upon life. Times change so suddenly and inexplicably. The hours seem to be at strifewith each other. We live in the midst of a perpetual conflict between ouryesterdays and our to-days. There is no simple, obvious sequence in themessage of experience. The days will not dovetail into each other. Life iscompact of much that is impossible of true adjustment at the hands of anytime-born philosophy. And in all this seeming confusion there lies thenecessity for faith. Herein it wins its victory. We are to trust God notbecause we cannot trace Him, but that by trusting Him we may ever be moreable to trace Him and to see that He has a way through all these windingand 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. Itdoes not make experience merely bearable, it makes it luminous andinstructive. It takes the separate or the tangled strands of humanexperience 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 todiscount the worth of the habitual in our religious life. We put a premiumon self-consciousness. We reduce the life of faith to a series of acts offaith of varying difficulty and import, but each detached from the rest andindividually apprehended of the soul. Surely this is all wrong. In ourphysical life we are least conscious of those functions that are most vitaland continuous, and the more perfectly they do their work the less we thinkabout them. The analogy is incomplete and must be drawn with care. But whenyou 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 hardlesson, the value of the lesson to us is not the effort with which we learnit, but the ease with which we apply it. The measure of conscious effort inour faith is the measure of our faith's weakness. When faith has become aspontaneity of our character, when it turns to God instinctively, when itdoes its work with the involuntariness of habit, then it has become strong. 

_Pour out your heart before Him. _ How this singer understood the office andprivilege of the 'all times' trust! He knew that there is a fullness ofheart that is ill to bear. True, in more than one simple way the full heartcan find some slight relief. There is work. The full heart can go out anddo something. There is a brother's trouble in which a man may partly forgethis own. There is sympathy. Surely few are so lonely that they cannot findany one ready to offer the gift of the listening ear, any one willing toshare with them all of pain and burden that can be shared. Ah! but what ofthat which cannot be shared? What of the sorrow that has no language, andthe shame and confusion that we would not, and even dare not, trail acrossa friend's mind? So often the heart holds more than ever should be pouredout into another's ear. There are in life strained silences that we couldnot break if we would. And there is a law of reticence that true love andunselfishness will always respect. If my brother hath joy, am I to cloud itwith my grief? If he hath sorrow, am I to add my sorrow unto his? When ourprecious earthly fellowship has been put to its last high uses in the hourof sorrow or shame, the heart has still a burden for which this world findsno relief. But there is another fellowship. There is God our Father. Thereis the ear of Heaven. We may be girt with silence among our fellows, but inlooking up the heart finds freedom. In His Presence the voice of confessioncan break through the gag of shame, and the pent-up tide of trouble can letitself break upon the heart of Eternal Love. 

_God is a refuge for us. _ That is the great discovery of faith. That is themerciful word that comes to be written so plainly in the life that hasformed 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. Butthe refuge some day and the faith every day are linked together. A thing isno use to you if you cannot find it when you want it. And you cannot findit easily if it be not at hand. The peasant built his cottage under theshadow of his lord's castle walls. In the hour of peril it was but a stepto the strong fortress. 'Trust in Him at all times. ' Build your house underthe walls of the Eternal Help. Live in the Presence. Find the attitude offaith, and the act of faith will be simple. Trust in Him through everyhour, and when a tragic hour comes one step shall take you into theinnermost 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 andquest are nearly always linked closely together. The man who desires moneyseeks after money. The desire of the world is often disappointed, but it israrely supine. It is dynamic. It leads men. True, it leads them astray; butthat is a reflection on its wisdom and not on its effectiveness. Among whatwe rightly call the lower things men do not play with their desires, theyobey them. But amid the unseen realities of life it is often quiteotherwise. In the religious life desire is sometimes strangely ineffective. It is static, if that be not a contradiction in terms. In many a life-storyit stands written: One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I dreamof, that will I hope for, that will I wait for. Many things help to explainthis attitude, and, explaining it, they condemn it also. We allow oursurroundings to pass judgement on our longings. We bring the eternal to thebar of the hour, and postpone the verdict. Or it may be in the worldlinessof our hearts we admit the false plea of urgency and the false claim ofauthority made by our outward life. And perhaps more commonly the soullacks the courage of its desires. It costs little to follow a desire thatgoes but a little way, and that on the level of familiar effort and withinsight of familiar things. It is another thing to hear the call of themountains and to feel the fascination of some far and glittering peak. Thatis a call to perilous and painful effort. And yet again, high desiresometimes leaves life where it found it because the heart attaches anintrinsic value to vision. It is something to have _seen_ the Alpineheights of possibility. Yes, it is something, but what is it? It is agolden hour to the man who sets out to the climb; it is an hour of shameand judgement, hereafter to be manifest, to the man who clings to thecomforts of the valley. 

_One thing have I desired. _ When a man speaks thus unto us, we have a rightto ponder his words with care. We naturally become profoundly interested, expectant, and, to the limit of our powers, critical. If a man has seen onething that he can call simply and finally the desire of his heart, it oughtto be worth looking at. We expect something large, lofty, inclusive. And wefind this: '_That I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of mylife, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in His temple. _' Letus examine this desire, And, first of all, we must free our minds from mereliteralism. If we do not, we shall find in this desire many things that arenot in it, and miss everything that is in it. This is not the longing for acloistered 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 fairand unseen dwelling-place builded by the hands of God to be the home, hereand hereafter, of all the hearts that purely love and worship Him. We readof one who, a day's march from his father's house, lay down and slept; andin 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 towhom the voice of God has come, and who has listened to that voice andbelieved in its message, the mountains and valleys of this fair world, thebreath of every morning and the hush of every evening, are instinct with aPresence. Wordsworth dwelt in the house of the Lord all the days of hislife. And if the wonder and beauty of the earth lift up our hearts unto ourGod in praise and worship, we dwell there also. 

Yes, but this world is a world of men. In city or on hillside the greatpersistent fact for us, the real setting of our life, is not nature, buthumanity. Life is not a peaceful vision of earthly beauty. Our experienceis not a dreamy pastoral. There are shamed and broken lives. The world isfull of greed and hate and warfare and sorrow. Nature at its best cannot byitself build for us a temple that humanity at its worst, or even atsomething less than its worst, cannot pull down about our ears. For thePsalmist, probably David himself, the temple was symbolic of all heavenlyrealities. 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 andpower and perfect assurance of these things he desired to dwell all thedays of his life. For us there is the life and word of One greater than thetemple. Jesus of Nazareth dwelt in the house of the Lord. Between Him andGod the Father there was perfect union. And no one ever saw the worth ofhuman life as Jesus saw it. And no one ever measured the sacred values ofhumanity as He measured them. And now, in the perfect mercy of God, thereis no man but may dwell in the house of God alway and feel life'ssacredness amidst a thousand desecrations, and know its preciousness amidstall 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 learnwhat beauty is, and where to look for it. Out in the world beauty is heldto be a sporadic thing. It is like a flower growing where no one expected ablossom. It is an unrelated and unexplained surprise. It is a green oasisin the desert of unlovely and unpromising things. But for the dweller inthe 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 theleagues of burning sand and saw the loveliness of Carmel by the sea, and ofSharon where the lilies grow. To the artist beauty is an incident, to thesaint beauty is a law of life. It is the thing that is to be. It is thepositive purpose, throbbing and yearning and struggling in the wholeuniverse. 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 thevital issue of human life. To dwell in the Divine Presence by faith andobedience; to live so near to God that you can see all about yourself andevery human soul the real means of life, and straight before you the realend 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 wholeof life in the terms of God's saving purpose, --this is to behold the beautyof the Lord. 

_And to inquire in His temple. _ The Psalmist desired for himself an inwardattitude before God that should not only reveal unto him the eternalfitness of all God's ways and the eternal grace of all His purposes, butshould also put him in the way of solving the various problems that ariseto try the wisdom and strength of men's lives. Sometimes the first court ofappeal in life, and always the last, is the temple court. When all theworld is dumb, a voice speaks to them that worship. Reverential love neverloses its bearings. In this world we need personal and social guidance, andthere must be many times when both shall be wanting unless we have learnedto carry the burden of our ignorance to the feet of the Eternal Wisdom. Andperhaps a man can desire no better thing for himself than that thereverence and devotion of his life should be such as to make the appeal toGod'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 werecognize this fact. We do not by choice live in a house whose windowsfront 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 ahouse, 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 apoor affair for any man who looks out upon the blind walls of earthlycircumstance and necessity, and cannot see from his soul's dwelling-placethe pink flush of the dawn that men call hope, and who has no garden wherehe may grow the blossoms of faith and sweet memory, the fair flowers ofholy human trusts and fellowships. Only the divinity of life can deliver usfrom the monotony of living. 'Mine eyes are ever toward the Lord. ' This manhas an infinite outlook. It matters not whether he looked out throughpalace windows or lived in the meanest house in Jerusalem's city. It is theeye that makes the view. This man had a fairer prospect than ever man hadwho looked seaward from Carmel or across the valleys from the steeps ofLibanus. It was his soul that claimed the prospect. From the window of thelittle house of life he saw the light of God lying on the everlastinghills. That is the real deliverance from the monotony of things. The manwho is weary of life is the man who has not seen it. The man who is tied tohis desk sometimes thinks everything would be right if only he couldtravel. But many a man has done the Grand Tour and come back no bettercontented. 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 curefor 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 gazecontemptuously on the little one-story lodge just inside the park gates, and fail to get a glimpse of the magnificent mansion, with its wealth ofadornment and treasure, that lies a mile among the trees. No wonder thatmen grow discontented or contemptuous when they mistake the porch for thehouse. If a man would understand himself and discover his resources and puthis 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 lifeholds, are linked to the larger life of an eternal world. 

That is the true foresight. They called him a far-seeing man. How did heget that name? Well, he made a fortune. He managed to make use of the ebband flow of the market, and never once got stranded. He was shrewd and didsome 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 sympathyare dried up in his soul. He can see as far into the money column as mostmen, but the financial vista is not very satisfying for those who see itbest. The Gospel of St. John is a sealed book to him, and that is in God'shandwriting and opens the gates of heaven. Far-seeing? Why, the man is in atiny 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 outbefore him. He can see the glory of the eternal righteousness beneath hisdaily duties and the wonder of eternal love in the daily fellowships andfulfilments of the brotherhood. This is measuring life by the heavenlymeasurement. This is the vision we need day by day and at the end of thedays. For interest in some things must wane, and life must become lessresponsive to all that lies about it, and many an earthly link is brokenand many an earthly window is darkened, and the old faces and old wayspass, and the thing the old man cherishes is trodden under foot by theimpetuous tread of a new generation, and desire fails. Then it is well withhim 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 uponlife. It brings guidance and deliverance. Set side by side the twoexpressions 'eyes unto the Lord, ' and 'feet out of the net. ' Life is morethan a vision; it is a pilgrimage. We see the far white peaks whereon reststhe 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. Hereour Christian idealism lays a burden on us. It is possible to see distancesthat would take days to traverse. Even so we can see heights of spiritualpossibility that we shall not reach while the light holds good unless wefoot it bravely. And it is not an easy journey. There are so many snaresset for the pilgrims of faith and hope. There are subtle silken nets wovenof soft-spun deceits and filmy threads of sin; and there are coarse strongnets fashioned by the strong hands of passion and evil desire. There arenets of doubt and pain and weakness. But think of the man whose eyes wereever towards the Lord. He came through all right. He always does. He alwayswill. He looked steadily upward to his God. When we get into the net weyield to the natural tendency to look down at our feet. We try to discoverhow the net is made. We delude ourselves with the idea that if only we taketime we shall be able to extricate ourselves; but it always means gettingfurther entangled. It is a waste of time to study the net. Life is everweaving for us snares too intricate for us to unravel and too strong for usto break. God alone understands how they are made and how they may bebroken. He does not take us round the net or over it, but He does not leaveus fast by the feet in the midst of it. He always brings a man out on theheavenward side of the earthly difficulty. Look upward and you are bound togo 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 thebeginning. If you wish to straighten out a tangle of string, you know thatit is worth your while to look patiently for one of the ends. If you makean aimless dash at it the result is confusion worse confounded, andby-and-by the tangle is thrown down in despair, its worst knots made by thehands 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 thetwists, at least shows us where the two ends are. They are with God and thesoul. God deals with a man's soul. We cannot explain the facts of ourexperience or the fashion of our circumstance save in as far as we can seethese things reflected in our character. The true spiritual philosophy oflife begins its inquiry in the soul, and works outward into all thepuzzling mass of life's details. And the foundation of such a philosophy isnot experience, but faith. It is true that experience often confirms faith, but faith interprets experience. Experience asks more questions than it cananswer. It collects more facts than it can explain. It admits of manydifferent constructions being put upon it. It puts us first of all intotouch 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, soalso are the bitter protests of the disappointed worldling. The fashion ofthe experience may be the same in each case. It is faith that makes thelesson different. It is a want of faith that makes us expect the lower inlife to explain the higher, the outward to shed light upon the inward. Wepluck 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 havegot to the end of it. We draw our shallow conclusions. Faith teaches usthat God's way with us is a longer and a deeper way, and the end of thatway is down in the depths of our spirit, hidden in the love of ourcharacter. It is not here and now. It is in what we shall be if God haveHis will with us. 

All the true definitions of things are written in the soul. It was herethat the Psalmist found his definition of evil. 'The Lord shall keep theefrom all evil; He shall keep thy soul. ' Then evil is something thatthreatens the soul. It is not material, but spiritual. It is not in ourcircumstances themselves, but in their effect upon the inward life. Thesame outward conditions of life may be good or evil according to theirinfluence on our character. Good and evil are not qualities of things. Theyhave no meaning apart from the soul. The world says that health and wealthare good, and that sickness and poverty are evil. If that were true theline that separates the healthy from the sick, the rich from the poor, would also separate the happy from the miserable. But we find joy andsorrow on both sides of that line. We are drawn to look deeper than thisfor our definition of good and evil. We have to make the soul the finalarbiter amid these conflicting voices. Here we must find the truedefinition of evil. The first question we ask when we hear of a househaving been burnt down is this: 'Was there any loss of life?' All else lieson a vastly lower plane of interest and importance. So must we learn todistinguish 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 strengthand treasure. The man who has lost everything except faith and hope has, maybe, lost nothing at all. There are some among the pilgrims of faithto-day who would never have been found there had not God cast upon theirshoulders the ragged cloak of poverty; and if you know anything about thatband of pilgrims you will know that the man who outstrips his companions isoften a man who is lame on both his feet. 

O sceptic world, this is the final answer to your scepticism, an answernone the less true because you cannot receive it: _The Lord keepeth thesouls 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 workof maiming and spoiling meant light and sunshine and air in a close anddarkened room. It meant health to the dwellers in the house over which thetree had cast its shadow. It is much to have tall and stately trees in thegarden of life. But by-and-by that great oak of vigour begins to darken thewindows 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 ambitionhave grown taller than the roof-tree, and God sends forth His storm-wind tolay 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 mostof all that the light of His truth and the warmth of His love and thebreath 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 divinecomfort and peace, and that can do something towards interpreting for usevery coil of difficulty, every hour of pain. But if this is to be so, wemust ourselves be true to the view of life the promise gives us. We mustthink of the soul as God thinks of it. We live in a world where souls arecheap. They are bought and sold day by day. It is strange beyond allunderstanding that the only thing many a man is not afraid of losing is theone thing that is really worth anything to him--his soul. Sometimes thelusts of the world drag down our heart's desire, and we have to confesswith shame to moments in our experience when we have not been at allconcerned with what became of our soul so long as the desire of the hourwas fulfilled or satisfied. We need to seek day by day that the masterfuland abiding desires of our heart may be set upon undying good, and that ouraspiration may never fold its wings and rest on anything lower than thehighest. This shall not make dreamers of us. It shall stand us in goodstead 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 aman stands to win or lose in any deal is the cleanness of his soul. The manwho 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 getsthe best of life is the man who keeps the honour of his soul; for Jesussaid: 'What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose hisown soul?'

So then, amid the manifold uncertainties of human life and theever-changing forms and complexions of human experience, one thing ispledged beyond all doubt to every man who seeks the will of God and thepromise for the safeguarding of his soul. He may write this at the top ofevery 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 hislips 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 tolook with untroubled eyes upon the outward things of life, nor fear thetouch of its thousand grasping hands, knowing that his soul is in the handsof 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 withouthaving some thought of their compensative relation. We set our bright daysagainst our dark days. We weigh our successes against our failures. Whenthe hour through which we are living is whispering a bitter message, werecall the kindlier messages of other hours and say that we have much forwhich we ought to be thankful. And such a deliberate handling ofexperience, 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. Anyreckoning that will prevent a man from indulging in self-pity--thatsubtlety of selfishness--is worth making. There is, moreover, somethingvery simple and obvious in this way of thinking and judging. To make onekind of experience deal with another kind, to set the days and the hours inbattle array--or shall we say to arrange a tourney where somegaily-caparisoned and well-mounted Yesterday is set to tilt with ablack-visored and silent To-day--is a way of dealing with life which seemsto have much to commend it. But it has at the best serious limitations, andat 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 againstanother has gone to the making of many a cynic and not a few despairingsouls. The compensative interpretation of joy and sorrow may bring ananswer of peace to a man's soul, or it may not. But in this matter we aredealing with things in which we cannot afford to risk an equivocal or adespairing 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 worthfighting if it was fought for the sake of the hour. The moments are everchallenging the eternal, the swift and busy hours fling their gauntlets atthe feet of the ageless things. The real battle of life is never betweenyesterday and to-day; it is always between to-day and the Forever. 

To isolate an experience is to misinterpret it. We may even completelyclassify experiences, and yet completely misunderstand experience. Tounderstand life at all we must get beyond the incidental and thealternating. Life is not a series of events charged with elements ofcontrast, contradiction, or surprise. It is a deep, coherent, andunfaltering process. And one feels that it was something more than thechance of the moment that led the singer of old to weave the tears and therejoicings of men's lives into a figure of speech that stands for unity ofprocess, even the figure of the harvest. 

_They that sow in tears shall reap in joy. _ The sweep of golden grain isnot some arbitrary compensation for the life of the seed cast so lavishlyinto the ground, and biding the test of darkness and cold. It is the veryseed itself fulfilled of all its being. Even so it is with the sorrows ofthese hearts of ours and the joy unto which God bringeth us. He does notfling us a few glad hours to atone for the hours wherein we have sufferedadversity. There is a deep sense in which the joys of life are its ripenedsorrows. 

_They that sow in tears. . . . He that goeth forth and weepeth. _ These are notthe few who have been haunted by apparent failure, or beset with outwardlypainful conditions of service. They are not those who have walked in theshadow of a lost leader, or toiled in the grey loneliness of a lost comradeor of a brother proved untrue. For apparent failure, outward difficulty andloneliness, often as we may have to face them, are, after all, only theaccidents of Godward toil. And if the bearer of seed for God's greatharvest should go forth to find no experience of these things, still, if heis 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 himopen his heart without reserve to the two great claims of the ideal andsympathy, and he shall come to know that he has not found the hiddenmeaning 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 thepledge of harvest are not called to the eyes by ridicule or opposition. They are not the tears of disappointment, vexation, or impotence. They aretears that dim the eyes of them that see visions, and gather in the heartof them that dream dreams. To see the glory of God in the face of JesusChrist and the blindness of the world's heart to that glory; to seeunveiled 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 loveand life, and responds to every note of pain borne in upon it from themurmurous trouble of the world, --this is to have inward fitness for thehigh work of the Kingdom. Yes, and it is the pledge that this work shall bedone. There is such a thing as artistic grief. There is the vain andlanguorous pity of aestheticism. Its robe of sympathy is wrapped aboutitself and bejewelled with its own tears. And it never goes forth. Younever meet it in 'the darkness of the terrible streets. '

_He that goeth forth and weepeth. _ It is his tears that cause him to goforth. It is his sorrow that will not let him rest. True pity is a mightymotive. When the real abiding pathos of life has gripped a man's heart, youwill find him afield doing the work of the Lord. You will not see histears. 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 torefer the whole meaning of the words about a man's coming 'again withrejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him' to some far day when the reapersof God shall gather the last great harvest of the world. Through his tearsthe sower sees the harvest. Through all his life there rings many a sweetprophetic echo of the harvest home. 

_He that goeth forth and weepeth. _ No man ever wept like that and went notforth, but some go forth who have not wept. And they go forth to certainfailure. They mishandle life, and with good intent do harm. But that is notthe worst thing to be said about these toilers without tears. It is notthat they touch life so unskilfully, but they touch so little of it. It isonly 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 needsof the world. So many try very earnestly to deal with situations they havenever yet really seen. For the uplifting of men and for the great socialtask of this our day we need ideas, and enthusiasm, and all sorts ofresource; but most of all, and first of all, we need vision. And the manwho goes farthest, and sees most, and does most, is 'he that goeth forthand 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 livewithout Me. As the years pass over his head he shall learn that there isone need woven into human life larger and deeper and more abiding than anyother need--and that need is God. Thus doth divinity prophesy concerninghumanity. Thus doth infinite foresight predict a man's need. 

We peer in our purblind fashion into the future and try to anticipate ourneeds. We fence ourselves in with all sorts of fancied securities, and thenwe comfort ourselves with the shrewdness and completeness of ourforecasting and provision-making. And sometimes it is just folly with agrave face. 'He shall call upon Me. ' A man has learned nothing until he haslearned that he needs God. And we take a long time over that lesson. It hassometimes to be beaten into us--written in conscience and heart by thefinger of pain. How the little storehouse of life has to be almost strippedof its treasures, how our faith in the things of the hour has to be playedwith and mocked, ere we call upon God in heaven to fill us with abidingtreasure and fold us in eternal love. 

_He shall call upon Me, and, I will answer him. _ But I have called, saysone, and He has not answered. I called upon Him when my little child wassick unto death, and, spite my calling, the little white soul flutterednoiselessly into the great beyond. My friend, you call that tiny greenmound in the churchyard God's silence. Some day you will call it God'sanswer. Our prayers are sometimes torn out of our hearts by the pain of themoment. God's answers come forth from the unerring quiet of eternity. 'Heshall call upon Me. ' 'He shall ask Me to help him, but he does not know howhe can be helped. He is hedged about by a thousand limitations of thought. His life is full of distortions. He cannot distinguish between a blessingand a curse. I cannot heed the dictations of his prayers, but I will answerhim. ' This is the voice of Him to whom the ravelled complexities of men'sminds are simplicity itself; who dwells beyond the brief bewilderments andmistaken desirings and false ideals of men's hearts. 

Oh these divine answers! How they confuse us! It is their perfection thatbewilders us; it is their completeness that carries them beyond ourcomprehension. 

There is the stamp of the local and the temporary on all our asking. Theanswer that comes is wider than life and longer than time, and fashionedafter a completeness whereof we do not even dream. 

_I will be with him in trouble. _ Trouble is that in life which becomes tous a gospel of tears, a ministry of futility. This is because we havegrasped the humanity of the word and missed the divinity of it. We arealways doing that. Always gathering the meaning of the moments and missingthe meaning of the years. Always smarting under the sharp discipline andmissing the merciful design: 'With Him in trouble. ' That helps me tobelieve in my religion. Trouble is the test of the creeds. A fig for theorthodoxy that cannot interpret tears! Write vanity upon the religion thatis of no avail in the house of sorrow. When the earthly song falls onsilence we are disposed to call it a pitiable silence. Not so. Let us say adivinely opportune silence, for when the many voices grow dumb the OneVoice speaks: 'I will be with him in trouble, ' and the man who has lost theeverything that is nothing only to find the one thing that is all knowswhat that promise means. 

_I will deliver him. _ What a masterful, availing, victorious presence isthis! 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 hebears a burden we cannot share! How often the earthly sympathy is just acommunion of sad hearts--one weak hand holding another! 'I will deliverhim. ' That is not merely sympathy, it is victory. The divine love does notmerely condole, it delivers. 

You cannot add anything to this promise. It is complete. The time of thedeliverance is there, the manner of it is there, the whole ministry of helpis there. You say you cannot find anything about time and manner. You canonly find the bare promise of deliverance. My friend, there are no barepromises in the lips of the Heavenly Father. In the mighty, mercifulleisure of omnipotence, in the perfect fitness of things, in a way wiserthan his thinking and better than his hoping and larger than his prayer, 'Iwill 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 itstroubles and seems sometimes to be successful, until we see how thosetroubles have shaken its spirit and twisted its temper; and see, too, howmuch of the beautiful and the strong and the sweet has been lost in thefight. 'I will deliver him' with an abundant and an honourabledeliverance--he shall come forth from his tribulations more noble, tender, and self-possessed. Hereafter there shall be given him the honour of onewhom the stress of life has driven into the arms of God. 

Oh how we miss this ministry of ennoblement! We reap a harvest ofinsignificance from the seeds of sorrow sown in our hearts. We let ourcares dishonour us. The little cares rasp and fret and sting the manlinessand the womanliness and the godlikeness out of us. And the great carescrush us earthward till there is scarcely a sweet word left in our lips ora noble thought in our heart. A man cannot save his _soul_ in the day oftrouble. He cannot by himself make good the wear and tear of anxieties andgriefs. He can hold his head high and hide his secret deep, but he cannotkeep his life sweet. Only Christ can teach a man how to find the namelessdignity of the crown of thorns. The kingship of suffering is a secret inthe keeping of faith and love. If a man accepts this deliverance of his Godfolded in flashes of understanding, ministries of explanation, revivals offaith, and gifts of endurance, he shall find the honour that is to be wonamong life's hard and bitter things. 

_With long life will I satisfy him, and show him My salvation. _ We haveseen a grey-headed libertine, and we have missed from among theclean-hearted and the faithful some brave young life that was giving itselfvigorously to the holy service. But perhaps we have had the grace not tochallenge the utter faithfulness of God. The measure of life is not writtenon a registrar's certificates of birth and death. There is something herethat lies beyond dates and documents. Life here and hereafter is one, anddeath is but an event in it. Who lives to God lives long, be his years manyor few. It is reasonable to expect some relationship between godliness andlongevity. But we are nearer the truth when we see how that faith andprayer discover and secure the eternal values of fleeting days. 

_And show him My salvation. _ That is the whole text summed up in onephrase. That is the life of the godly man gathered into the compass of thedivine promise. For every one who goes the way of faith and obedience, lifein every phase of it, life here and hereafter, means but one thing andholds but one thing, and that is _the salvation of the Lord_. 

VIII. 

PETITION AND COMMUNION

 Hear me speedily, O Lord. . . . Cause me to hear . . . For I lift up my soul unto Thee. 

 Ps. Cxliii. 7, 8. 

You will notice that the first verse begins 'Hear me, ' and the secondbegins 'Cause me to hear'; and the second is greater than the first. Let uslook, then, at these two attitudes of a man in his hour of prayer. 

_Hear me. _ The Psalmist began, where all men must begin, with himself. Hehad something to utter in the hearing of the Almighty. He had something tolay before his God--a story, a confession, a plea. His heart was full, andmust outpour itself into the ear of Heaven. 'Hear me speedily, O Lord. ' Wehave all prayed thus. We have all faced some situation that struck a noteof urgency in our life, and all your soul has come to our lips in this onecry that went up to the Father, 'Hear me. ' A sudden pain, a surprise ofsorrow, a few moments of misty uncertainty in the face of decisions thathad to be made at once, times when life has tried to rush us from ourestablished position and to bear us we know not where--and our soul hasreached out after God as simply and naturally as a man grasps at some fixedthing when he is falling. 

There are times, too, when prayer is an indefinable relief. We all knowsomething about the relief of speech. We must speak to somebody. Our needis not, first of all, either advice or practical help. We want a hearing. We want some one to listen and sympathize. We want to share our pain. Thatis what 'Hear me' sometimes means. Whatever Thou shalt see fit to do forme, at least listen to my cry. Let me unburden my soul. Let me get thisweight of silence off my heart. This fashion of relief is part of the trueoffice of prayer. Herein lies the reasonableness of telling our story inthe ear of One who knows that story better than we do. We need not informthe All-knowing, but we must commune with the All-pitiful. We make our lifeknown unto God that we may make it bearable unto ourselves. 

But let us look at the attitude of mind and heart revealed in this secondposition, _Cause me to hear_. Now we are coming to the larger truth aboutprayer, and the deeper spirit of it. Prayer is not merely claiming ahearing; it is giving a hearing. It is not only speaking to God; it islistening to God. And as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are thewords we hear greater than the words we speak. Let us not forget this. Letus not pauperize ourselves by our very importunity. Maybe we are vociferouswhen God is but waiting for a silence to fall in His earthly temples thatHe may have speech with His children. We talk about 'prevailing prayer, 'and there is a great truth in the phrase. All prayer does not prevail. There is that among men which passes for prayer but has no spiritual grip, no assurance, no masterful patience, no fine desperation. There is a placefor all these things, and a need for them, in the life of prayer. We needthe courage of a great faith and the earnestness that is born of necessity. We need to be able to lift up our faces toward heaven in the swelling joysand the startling perils of these mortal hours and cry, 'Hear me, ' knowingthat God does hear us and that the outcrying of every praying heart ringsclear and strong in the courts of the Heavenly King. But we need somethingmore; we need a very great deal more than this, if we are to enter into thetrue meaning of prevailing prayer. The final triumph of prayer is not ours;it is God's. When we are upon our knees before Him, it is He, and not we, that must prevail. This is the true victory of faith and prayer, when theFather writes His purpose more clearly in our minds, lays His commandmentmore inwardly upon our hearts. We do not get one faint glimpse into themeaning of that mysterious conflict at Peniel until we see that thenecessity for the conflict lay in the heart of Jacob and not in the heartof God. The man who wrestled with the Angel and prevailed passes before usin the glow of the sunrise weary and halt, with a changed name and achanged heart. So must it be with us; so shall it be, if ever we know whatit is to prevail in prayer. Importunity must not become a blind anduninspired clamouring for the thing we desire. Such an attitude may easilyset us beyond the possibility of receiving that which God knows we need. Wemust not forget that our poor little plea for help and blessing does notexhaust the possibilities of prayer. Our words go upward to God's thronetwisted by our imperfect thinking, narrowed by our outlook, sterilized bythe doubts of our hearts, and we do not know what is good for us. His wordcomes downward into our lives laden with the quiet certainty of theEternal, wide as the vision of Him who seeth all, deep as the wisdom of Himwho knoweth all. 

So, however much it may be to say 'Hear me, ' it is vastly more to say'Cause me to hear. ' However much I have to tell Him, He has more to tellme. This view of prayer will help to clear up for us some of thedifficulties that have troubled many minds. We hear people speak ofunanswered prayer; but there is no such thing, and in the nature of thingsthere cannot be. I do not mean by that, that to every prayer there willcome a response some day. To every prayer there is a response now. In ourconfused and mechanical conception of the God to whom we pray, we separatebetween His hearing and His answering. We identify the answer to prayerwith the granting of a petition. But prayer is more than petition. It isnot our many requests, it is an attitude of spirit. We grant readily thatour words are the least important part of our prayers. But very often thepetitions we frame and utter are no part of our prayers at all. They arenot prayer, yet uttering them we may pray a prayer that shall be heard andanswered, for every man who truly desires in prayer the help of God for hislife receives that help there and then, though the terms in which hedescribes his need may be wholly wide of the truth as God knows it. So thereal answer to prayer is God's response to man's spiritual attitude, andthat response is as complete and continuous as the attitude will allow itto be. The end of prayer is not to win concessions from Almighty Power, butto have communion with Almighty Love. 

'Cause me to hear'; make a reverent, responsive, receptive silence in myheart, take me out beyond my pleadings into the limitless visions and thefathomless satisfactions of communion with Thyself. Speak to me. That istrue prayer. 

 In the quietness of life, When the flowers have shut their eye, And a stainless breadth of sky Bends above the hill of strife, Then, my God, my chiefest Good, Breathe upon my lonelihood: Let the shining silence be Filled with Thee, my God, with Thee. 

IX. 

HAUNTED HOURS

 Wherefore should I fear in the days of evil, when iniquity at my heels compasseth me about?

 Ps. Xlix. 5. 

Iniquity _at my heels_. Temptation is very often indirect. It is compact ofwiles and subtleties and stratagems. It is adept at taking cover. It doesnot make a frontal attack unless the obvious state of the soul's defencesjustifies such a method of attempting a conquest. The stronger a man is, the more subtle and difficult are the ways of sin, as it seeks to enter andto master his life. There are many temptations that never face us, andnever give us a chance of facing them. They follow us. We can hear theirlight footfall and their soft whisperings, but the moment we turn roundupon them they vanish. If they disappeared for good, they would be theeasiest to deal with of all the ill things that beset our lives. But theydo not. The moment we relax our bold, stern search for the face of theenemy, there the evil thing is again--the light footfall and the softvoice. It is terrible work fighting a suggestion. There are the thoughtsthat a man will not cherish and cannot slay. They may never enter theprogramme of his life, but there they are, haunting him, waiting, so tospeak, at the back of his brain, till he gets used to them. When he seeksto grapple with these enemies his hands close on emptiness. One straightblow, one decisive denial, one stern rebuke, one defiant confession offaith will not suffice for these things. They compass a man's heels. Hecannot trample them down. The fashion of the evils that compass usdetermines the form of the fight we wage with them. Preparations that mightamply suffice the city in the day when an army with banners comes againstit are no good at all if a plague has to be fought. So there is a way wehave to take with 'the iniquity at our heels. ' It calls for much patienceand much prayer. If we cannot prevent sin from following us, we can atleast prevent ourselves from turning and following it. A man can alwayschoose his path if he cannot at every moment determine his company. And asa man goes onward and upward steadfastly toward the City of Light, the evilthings fall off and drop behind, and God shall bring him where no evilthing dare follow, and where no ravenous beast shall stalk its prey. 

The battle with sin is not an incident in the Christian life; it is theabiding condition of it. While there are some temptations that we have toslay, there are others we have to outgrow. They are overcome, not by anyone supreme assertion of the will, but by the patient cultivation of allthe loftiest and most wholesome and delicate and intensely spiritual modesof feeling and of being. 

Again, let me suggest that iniquity at our heels is sometimes an old sin ina new form. You remember the difficulty that Hiawatha had in hunting downPau-puk Keewis. That mischievous magician assumed the form of a beaver, then that of a bird, then that of a serpent; and though each in turn wasslain, the magician escaped and mocked his pursuer. Surely a parable of ourstrife with sin. We smite it in one form and it comes to life in another. One day a man is angry--clenched fingers and hot words. He conquers hisanger; but the next day there is a spirit of bitterness rankling in hisheart, and maybe a tinge of regret that he did not say and do more when hisheart was hot within him and fire was on his lips. The sin he faced andfought yesterday has become iniquity at his heels. Having failed to knockhim down, it tries to trip him up. Maybe many waste their energies tryingto deal with the _forms_ of sin, and never grapple with the _fact_ of sin. Hence the evil things that compass men's souls about with their dreadministries of suggestion, and flutter on unhallowed wings in the wake oflife. The sin that confronts us reveals to us our need of strength, but thesin that dogs our steps has, maybe, a deeper lesson to teach us--even ourneed of heart-deep holiness. Good resolution will do much to clear the pathahead, but only purity of character can rid us of the persistent hauntingperil of the sin that plucks at the skirt of life. The deliverance Godoffers to the struggling soul covers not only the hour of actual grapplingwith the foe, but all the hours when it is the stealth and not the strengthof evil that we most have cause to fear. 

_Iniquity at my heels. _ These words remind us that sin is not done withafter it is committed. God forgives sin, but He does not obliterate all itsconsequences, either in our own lives or in the lives of others. A man mayhave the light of the City of God flashing in his face, and a whole host ofshameful memories and bitter regrets crowding at his heels. We do not knowwhat sin is till we turn our backs on it. Then we find its tenacity and itsentanglement. What would we not give if only we could leave some thingsbehind us! What would we not do if only we could put a space betweenourselves and our past! The fetters of evil habit may be broken, but theirmarks are upon us, and the feet that bore the fetters go more slowly forthem many days. The hands that have been used to grasping and holding donot open without an effort, even though the heart has at last learned thatit is more blessed to give than to receive. 

Yes, and our sins come to life again in the lives of others. The light wordthat ought to have been a grave word and that shook another's goodresolution, the cool word that ought to have been a warm word and thatchilled a pure enthusiasm--we cannot have done with these things. Parentssometimes live to see their sins of indulgence or of neglect blighting thelives of those to whom they owed a debt of firmness and kindness. It isiniquity at the heels. These passages of carelessness and unfaithfulnesshaunt men, be their repentance never so bitter and their amendment never sosincere and successful. But all this is for discipline and not for despair. It casts us back upon God's mercy. It keeps the shadow of the cross uponall our path. It has something to do with the making of 'a humble, lowly, penitent, and obedient heart. ' The memory of the irreparable is a sorrow ofthe saints. 

 Saint, did I say? With your remembered faces, Dear men and women whom I sought and slew! Ah, when we mingle in the heavenly places, How will I weep to Stephen and to you!

Only let us not be afraid nor wholly cast down. Rather let us say, 'Wherefore should I fear when the iniquity at my heels compasseth meabout?' By the grace of God the hours of the soul's sad memory and ofclinging regrets shall mean unto us a ministry of humility and a passion ofprayer. And through them God shall give us glimpses of the gateway of thatlife where regret and shame and sorrow fall back unable to enter. There isa place whither the iniquity at a man's heels can no longer follow him, andwhere in the perfect life the soul, at last, is able to forget. 

X. 

THE WINGS OF THE DOVE

 And I said, Oh that I had wings like a dove! Then would I fly away, and be at rest. . . . I would haste me to a shelter From the stormy wind and tempest. 

 Ps. Lv. 6, 8. 

These words are the transcript of a mood. The writer is not unfolding to usany of the deep persistent longings of his spirit; he is telling us of athought that shadowed his soul for an hour. Let us look into this mood ofhis. It is not his in any unique or even peculiar sense. In moods, as inmanners, history is wont to repeat itself. The writer of this poem hasvoiced one of the great common experiences of humanity. But let us be quiteclear as to what that experience really is. Let us not be misled by themusic and the seeming unworldliness of these words about winged flight froma world of trouble and strife. The Psalmist was not looking heavenward, butearthward, when this plea for wings broke from his heart. He was moved tospeak as he did, not by the surpassing charm of a heavenly vision, but bythe dark unrest of the earthly outlook. The emphatic note here is that ofdeparture, not of destination. It is necessary to remind ourselves thatthis is so, for these words have become the classic of the home-sick soul. They have been used to voice the farthest and most truly divine desires ofthe human heart. And by virtue of such use they have gathered a meaningwhich was not theirs at the beginning. At that meaning we will presentlylook, but let us first of all look at this longing as it stands in thepsalm and as it represents an experience that is threaded through thehistory of humanity. 

_Oh that I had wings . . . Then would I fly away. _ Here the idea of fleeingaway suggests itself as a possible solution of life; and whenever it comesto a man like this it is a source of weakness. It is not a desire to findthe joys of heaven; it is a desire to escape the pains of earth. There isno vista, no wistful distance, no long, alluring prospect. The soul ishemmed in by its enemies, crushed down by its burdens, beset on all sidesby the frets of the earthly lot; and there comes a vague desire to be outof it all. It is not aspiration, it is evasion. It is not response to theideal, it is recoil from the actual. It is not the spell of that whichshall be that is upon the soul, but the irksomeness or the dreadfulness ofthat which is. This is a mood that awaits us all. No man faces life as itshould be faced, but some can hardly be said to face it at all. Their faceis ever turned towards a seductive vision of quietness. The solution oflife for them is not in a fight, but in a retreat. Of course we know thereis no going back, and no easy deliverance from the burden and the battle, but in the thick of any fight there is a great difference between the manwho wants victory and the man who merely wants a cessation of hostilities. 

This plea for wings does not necessarily betoken 'a desire to depart. ' Itrather indicates a desire to remain under more favourable and comfortableconditions. Such a mood is not the highest and the healthiest experience ofthe soul. It is rather something against which we must fight relentlessly. Very often the longing for wings results only in lagging footsteps. Picturing to ourselves the luxury of laying life down will not help us toface the duty of taking life up. The secret of enervation is found not inthe poverty of our resources, but in the cowardliness and selfishness ofour attitude towards life. The battle is half won when we have looked theenemy in the face. The burden is the better borne as we stoop under thefull weight of it. 

_Oh that I had wings like a dove!_ That is a short-sighted and a selfishdesire. Supposing you had wings, what would you do? Fly away from the moilof the world and find rest and shelter for yourself? Is that the best andnoblest thing to desire to do? After all, we know other and loftier moodsthan this. We know that staying is better than going when there is so muchto stay for. We know that working is better than resting when there is somuch to do. We have something better to think about than a quiet lodgementin the wilderness, we who live in a world where the strength of our handsand the warmth of our hearts count for something. To give your tiredbrother a lift is a vastly more profitable occupation than sitting at theroadside and wishing you could fly. Man, you ought to be glad that you canwalk--in a world where there are so many cripples that want help. 

_Oh that I had wings!. . . Then would I fly away. _ That desire has nevertaken any one to heaven, but it has made them less useful upon earth. Thebreath of this desire is able to blight the flowers of social service. Noone would be foolish enough to indict suburbanism as a mode of life. Theday must surely come when few or none will dwell in the smoke-grimed heartof the city. But in as far as a man seeks the fairest suburb open to him inorder that he may see little of, and think little of, 'the darkness of theterrible streets, ' then the very life that restores health to his bodyshall sow seeds of disease in his soul. 

There is only one way to rest, and that lies right through the heart of theworld's work and pain. Rest is not for those who flee away from life'sdifficulties, but for those who face them. 'Take my yoke . . . And ye shallfind rest. ' It were not well for our own sakes that we had wings. It werenot well for us to be able to avoid the burden-bearing and the tale oftired days, for God has hidden the secret of our rest in the heart of ourtoiling. They who come unto the City of God come there not by the easyflight of a dove, but by the long, slow pilgrimage of unselfishness. 

Yet there is a beauty and a fitness in this longing. It is expressive ofmore than the weariness of a world-worn spirit, or the thinly disguisedselfishness of one who fears to pay the price of life. 

When the long working-day of life is wearing away its last hours andverging towards the great stillness, the voices of time fall but faintly onthe ear, the adorations and ideals and fashions and enthusiasms of theworld come to mean little to a man who in his day has followed them aseagerly as any, and the heart within him asks only for rest. 

 God, if there be none beside Thee Dwelling in the light, Take me out of the world and hide me Somewhere behind the night. 

When, like Simeon the seer with the Christ-Child in his arms, a man feelsthat for him life has said its last word and shown its last wonder anduttered its last benediction, the desire for rest is a pure and spirituallynormal thing; it is just the soul's gaze turned upward where

 beyond these toils God waiteth us above, To give to hand and heart the spoils Of labour and of love. 

And maybe this mood of which we are thinking may have a not unworthy placein a strenuous life. As a tired woman pauses amid her tasks and looks outof her cottage window to take into her heart the quiet beauty of the woodswhere she knows the ground is fair with lilies, so do we find ourselveslooking out of life's small casement and thinking upon the fresh, free, 'outdoor' life the soul will some day live. And such a mood as this issurely a sign of the soul's growth, a testimony of its responsiveness tothe divine touch, a sudden sense of its splendid destiny borne in upon itamong the grey and narrow circumstances of its service. 

 Oh that I had a dove's swift, silver wings, I said, so I might straightway leave behind This strife of tongues, this tramp of feet, and find A world that knows no struggles and no stings, Where all about the soul soft Silence flings Her filmy garment, and the vexèd mind Grows quiet as there floats upon the wind The soothing slumber-song of dreamless things. And lo! there answered me a voice and said, Man, thou hast hands and heart, take back thy prayer; Covet life's weariness, go forth and share The common suffering and the toil for bread. Look not on Rest, although her face be fair, And her white hands shall smooth thy narrow bed. 

XI. 

A NEW SONG

 O sing unto the Lord a new song. 

 Ps. Xcvi. 1. 

Time and again in the Psalter we find this appeal for a new song. First ofall, and most obviously, the appeal concerns the contents of the song. Itreminds us of the duty of making our grateful acknowledgement of God'sgoodness to us expand with our growing experience of that goodness. It is, if, one may so phrase it, a reminder to us that our praise needs bringingup to date. A hymn considerably later in date than this psalm exhorts us to'count' our 'blessings, ' and to 'name them one by one. ' This exhortation toattempt the impossible is perhaps more worthy of being heeded than the formin which it is presented to us might lead some to suppose. There is nogetting away from the simple fact that a man's thankfulness has a real andproportionate relationship to the things for which he has cause to bethankful. If in our daily life the phrase 'the goodness of God' is to havea deepening and cumulative significance, it must be informed and vitalizedcontinually by an alert and responsive recognition of the forms in whichthat goodness is ever freshly manifested to us. Whilst the roots of thetree of praise lie deep beneath the surface, and wind their thousand waysinto dim places where memory itself cannot follow them, yet surely theleaves of the tree are fresher and greener for rain that even now has leftits reviving touch upon them, and for the sunshine that is even nowstirring the life in all their veins. The figure is imperfect. We are nottrees. We do not respond automatically to all the gracious and cheeringministries of the Eternal Goodness in our lives. We may easily overlookmany a good gift of our God. And though in our forgetfulness andunthankfulness we profit by the sunlight and the dew and by each tenderthought of God for His creatures, yet the full and perpetual profit of allgood things is for each of us bound up with the power to see them, thewisdom to appraise them, the mindfulness that holds them fast, and theheart that sings out its thanksgiving for them. 'O sing unto the Lord a newsong. ' Bring this day's life into the song. Bring the gift that has come tothee this very hour into the song. Look about thee. See if there be but onemore flower springing at the path-side. See if the bud of yesterday has butunfolded another leaf. Behold the loaf on thy table, feel the warmth of thyhearth, yea, feel the very life within thee that woke again and stirreditself with the morning light, and say these gifts are like unto the giftsof yesterday, but they are not yesterday's gifts. Yesterday's bread isbroken, and yesterday's fire is dead, and yesterday's strength is spent. OGod, Thy mercies are new every morning! So shall a new song break from theheart. 

It is quite possible, in taking what we believe to be a broad view of life, to overlook many of the things that go to make life. Too much generalizingmakes for a barren heart. The specific has a vital place in the ministry ofpraise. It is true that the highest flights of praise always carry the soulbeyond any conscious reckoning with the details of its experience. Tabulation is not the keystone of the arch of thanksgiving. But to beholdthe specific goodness of God in each day's life, to review the hours and tosay to one's own soul, Thus and thus hath my God been mindful of me, isperhaps the surest and the simplest way to deepen and vitalize the habit ofpraise in our life, and to set the new notes ringing in our psalm ofthanksgiving. 

But in this appeal for a new song of praise to God there is something morethan a recognition of new blessings. The new song is not merely theresponse to new mercies and the tuneful celebration of recent good. Ifthere is to be ever a new note in the song, there must be ever a new notein the singer's heart. And this cometh not by observation, but byinspiration. You may change the words of the song and it may still be theold song. You may sing the same words and it may yet be a new song. For asis the singer, so is the song. 

_O sing unto the Lord a new song. _ That is a plea for a deeper and a widerlife. It is a plea that sounds the depth of the heart and takes the measureof the soul. The new song comes not of a truer enumeration of life'sblessings, but of a truer understanding of the blessedness of life itself. The key to such understanding is character. When by the grace of the cleanheart and the enlightened and responsive spirit a man can get beneath theevents of each day's life and commune with that eternal law of love towhich each one of those events bears some relation--or had we not bettersay commune with the Eternal Father by whom that law exists?--then is hissong of praise ever new. It is something to catch a glimpse of the mercy ofGod, and to think and feel as one has not thought or felt before about somepart of life's daily good. But it is vastly more to learn to interpret thewhole of life in the terms of the goodness of God. The saint sings wherethe worldling sighs. And if we find in that song only the apotheosis ofcourage and resignation, we have neither found the source of the song northe message of it. The new song comes not from the thrill of peril facedand defied, nor from the victorious acceptance of hard and bitter things. It comes from that deep life of the soul in God, a life beyond the threatof peril and beyond the touch of pain. It finds its deepest and freshestnotes not in contemplating the new gains and good of any day, but in agrowing sense of the timeless gain and eternal good of every day. 

And if all this be so, it surely follows that the service of praise is notsomething unto which we may pass by one effort of the will or that dependsupon the stimulus of outward experience. It is conditioned rather by ourcharacter, and by our power to see the unveiled face of life reflectingalways the light of perfect love. And it is to produce in us the rightcharacter and the true insight that God disciplines us all our days. It isto set a new song in our hearts. Said a professor of music at Leipzig of agirl whom he had trained for some years and who was the pride of theConservatoire, 'If only some one would marry her and ill-treat her andbreak her heart she would be the finest singer in Europe. ' He missedsomething in the song, and knew it could never come there save from theheart of the singer. Trouble always strikes a new note in life, and oftenthe deepest note that is ever struck. But, be our experience joyous orsorrowful, the true end of it must ever be to deepen our own hearts thatthere may be in us ever a more catholic recognition of, and response to, the Eternal Love. 

The human soul is not a mere repository of experiences. Memory is not thetrue guardian of life's treasure. That treasure is invested in character. In the moral world we _have_ what we _are_. So we may recall that which wehave never possessed, and may possess that which we can never recall. Andit is out of that which we have _become_ by God's grace, rather than out ofthat which we have received of that grace, that the new song comes. 

So, as day by day we pray for the grace of new thanksgiving, we are seekingsomething more than a new power to behold what good things each day bringsus, a readier way of reckoning the wealth of the passing hours. We areseeking for a larger life in God, and for a spirit able, as it were, tosecrete from every experience its hidden meed of everlasting blessing. Forif the heart grow purer, the will stronger, the vision clearer, thejudgement truer--indeed, if there come to the soul each day some increaseof life--it shall surely find its way into living praise. And a living songis always a new song.