The Threshold Grace Part 1

The Threshold Grace.

by Percy C. Ainsworth.

PREFATORY NOTE

During his brief ministry Mr. Ainsworth published a series of meditations in the columns of the _Methodist Times_, which are here reprinted by the kind permission of the Editor, Dr. Scott Lidgett. The rare interest aroused by the previous publication of Mr. Ainsworth's sermons encourages the hope that the present volume may find a place in the devotional literature to which many turn in the quiet hour.

A.K.S.

I.

THE THRESHOLD GRACE

The Lord shall keep thy going out and thy coming in, from this time forth and for evermore.

Ps. cxxi, 8.

Going out and coming in. That is a picture of life. Beneath this old Hebrew phrase there lurks a symbolism that covers our whole experience. But let us just now look at the most literal, and by no means the least true, interpretation of these words. One of the great dividing-lines in human life is the threshold-line. On one side of this line a man has his 'world within the world,' the sanctuary of love, the sheltered place of peace, the scene of life's most personal, sacred, and exclusive obligations. And on the other side lies the larger life of mankind wherein also a man must take his place and do his work. Life is spent in crossing this threshold-line, going out to the many and coming in to the few, going out to answer the call of labour and coming in to take the right to rest. And over us all every hour there watches the Almighty Love. The division-lines in the life of man have nothing that corresponds to them in the love of G.o.d. We may be here or there, but He is everywhere.

_The Lord shall keep thy going out._ Life has always needed that promise.

There is a pledge of help for men as they fare forth to the world's work.

It was much for the folk of an early time to say that as they went forth the Lord went with them, but it is more for men to say and know that same thing to-day. The _going out_ has come to mean more age after age, generation after generation. It was a simpler thing once than it is now.

'Thy going out'--the shepherd to his flocks, the farmer to his field, the merchant to his merchandise. There are still flocks and fields and markets, but where are the leisure, grace, and simplicity of life for him who has any share in the world's work? Men go out to-day to face a life shadowed by vast industrial, commercial, and social problems. Life has grown complicated, involved, hard to understand, difficult to deal with. Tension, conflict, subtlety, surprise, and amid it all, or over it all, a vast brooding weariness that ever and again turns the heart sick. Oh the pains and the perils of the going out! There are elements of danger in modern life that threaten all the world's toilers, whatever their work may be and wherever they may have to do it. There is the danger that always lurks in _things_--a warped judgement, a confused reckoning, a narrowed outlook. It is so easily possible for a man to be at close grips with the world and yet to be ever more and more out of touch with its realities. The danger in the places where men toil is not that G.o.d is denied with a vociferous atheism; it is that He is ignored by an unvoiced indifference. It is not the babel of the market-place that men need to fear; it is its silence. If we say that we live only as we love, that we are strong only as we are pure, that we are successful only as we become just and good, the world into which we go forth does not deny these things--but it ignores them. And thus the real battle of life is not the toil for bread. It is fought by all who would keep alive and fresh in their hearts the truth that man doth not live by bread alone. For no man is this going out easy, for some it is at times terrible, for all it means a need that only this promise avails to meet--'The Lord shall keep thy going out.' He shall fence thee about with the ministry of His Spirit, and give thee grace to know, everywhere and always, that thou art in this world to live for His kingdom of love and truth and to grow a soul.

_The Lord, shall keep ... thy coming in._ It might seem to some that once a man was safely across the threshold of his home he might stand in less need of this promise of help. But experience says otherwise. The world has little respect for any man's threshold. It is capable of many a bold and shameless intrusion. The things that hara.s.s a man as he earns his tread sometimes haunt him as he eats it. No home is safe unless faith be the doorkeeper. 'In peace will I both lay me down and sleep, for Thou, Lord, alone makest me to dwell in safety.' The singer of that song knew that, as in the moil of the world, so also in the shelter of the place he named his dwelling-place, peace and safety were not of his making, but of G.o.d's giving.

Sometimes there is a problem and a pain waiting for a man across his own threshold. Many a man can more easily look upon the difficulties and perils of the outer world than he can come in and look into the pain-lined face of his little child. If we cannot face alone the hostilities on one side of our threshold we cannot face alone the intimacies on the other side of it.

After all, life is whole and continuous. Whatever the changes in the setting of life, there is no respite from living. And that means there is no leisure from duty, no rest from the service of obedience, no cessation in the working of all those forces by means of which, or in spite of which, life is ever being fas.h.i.+oned and fulfilled.

And now let us free our minds from the literalism of this promise and get a glimpse of its deeper application to our lives. The threshold of the home does not draw the truest division-line in life between the outward and the inward. Life is made up of thought and action, of the manifest things and the hidden things.

'Thy going out.' That is, our life as it is manifest to others, as it has points of contact with the world about us. We must go out. We must take up some att.i.tude toward all other life. We must add our word to the long human story and our touch to the fas.h.i.+oning of the world. We need the pledge of divine help in that life of ours in which, for their good or ill, others must have a place and a part. 'And thy coming in'--into that uninvaded sanctum of thought. Did we say uninvaded? Not so. In that inner room of life there sits Regret with her pale face, and Shame with dust on her forehead, and Memory with tears in her eyes. It is a pitiable thing at times, is this our coming in. More than one man has consumed his life in a flame of activity because he could not abide the coming in. 'The Lord shall keep ... thy coming in.' That means help for every lonely, impotent, inward hour of life.

Look at the last word of this promise--'for evermore.' Going out and coming in for evermore. I do not know how these words were interpreted when very literal meanings were attached to the parabolic words about the streets of gold and the endless song. But they present no difficulty to us. Indeed, they confirm that view of the future which is ever taking firmer hold of men's minds, and which is based on the growing sense of the continuity of life. To offer a man an eternity of music-laden rest is to offer him a poor thing. He would rather have his going out and his coming in. Yes, and he shall have them. All that is purest and best in them shall remain.

Hereafter he shall still go out to find deeper joys of living and wider visions of life; still come in to greater and ever greater thoughts of G.o.d.

II.

THE HABIT OF FAITH

Trust in Him at all times, ye people.

Pour out your heart before Him.

G.o.d is a refuge for us.

Ps. lxii. 8.

Here the Psalmist strikes the great note of faith as it should be struck.

He sets it ringing alike through the hours and the years. _Trust in Him at all times._ Faith is not an act, but an att.i.tude; not an event, but a principle; not a last resource, but the first and abiding necessity. It is the constant factor in life's spiritual reckonings. It is the ever-applicable and the ever-necessary. It is always in the high and lasting fitness of things. There are words that belong to hours or even moments, words that win their meaning from the newly created situation. But faith is not such a word. It stands for something inclusive and imperial.

It is one of the few timeless words in earth's vocabulary. For the deep roots of it and the wide range of it there is nothing like unto it in the whole sweep of things spiritual. So the 'all times' trust is not for one moment to be regarded as some supreme degree of faith unto which one here and there may attain and which the rest can well afford to look upon as a counsel of perfection. This exhortation to trust in G.o.d at all times concerns first of all the _nature_ of faith and not the _measure_ of it.

All real faith has the note of the eternal in it. It can meet the present because it is not of the present. We have grown familiar with the phrase, 'The man of the moment.' But who is this man? Sometimes he is very literally a man of the moment--an opportunist, a gambler with the hours, a follower of the main chance. The moment makes him, and pa.s.sing away unmakes him. But the true man of the moment is the man to whom the moment is but one throb in the pulse of eternity. For him the moment does not stand out in splendid isolation. It is set in its place between that which hath been and that which shall be. And its true significance is not something abiding in it, but something running through it. So is it in this great matter of faith. Only the faith that can trust at all times can trust at any time.

The moment that faith heeds the dictation of circ.u.mstance it ceases to be faith and becomes calculation. All faith is transcendent. It is independent of the conditions in which it has to live. It is not snared in the strange web of the tentative and the experimental. He that has for one moment felt the power of faith has got beyond the dominion of time.

_Trust in Him at all times._ That is the only real escape from confusion and contradiction in the judgements we are compelled to pa.s.s upon life.

Times change so suddenly and inexplicably. The hours seem to be at strife with each other. We live in the midst of a perpetual conflict between our yesterdays and our to-days. There is no simple, obvious sequence in the message of experience. The days will not dovetail into each other. Life is compact of much that is impossible of true adjustment at the hands of any time-born philosophy. And in all this seeming confusion there lies the necessity for faith. Herein it wins its victory. We are to trust G.o.d not because we cannot trace Him, but that by trusting Him we may ever be more able to trace Him and to see that He has a way through all these winding and crossing paths. Faith does more than hold a man's hand in the darkness; it leads him into the light. It is the secret of coherence and harmony. It does not make experience merely bearable, it makes it luminous and instructive. It takes the separate or the tangled strands of human experience and weaves them into one strong cable of help and hope.

_Trust in Him at all times._ Then faith at its best is a habit. Indeed, religion at its best is a habit, too! We are sometimes too ready to discount the worth of the habitual in our religious life. We put a premium on self-consciousness. We reduce the life of faith to a series of acts of faith of varying difficulty and import, but each detached from the rest and individually apprehended of the soul. Surely this is all wrong. In our physical life we are least conscious of those functions that are most vital and continuous, and the more perfectly they do their work the less we think about them. The a.n.a.logy is incomplete and must be drawn with care. But when you have conceded that faith has to be acquired, that it has to be learned, there is still this much in the a.n.a.logy. If faith is a long and hard lesson, the value of the lesson to us is not the effort with which we learn it, but the ease with which we apply it. The measure of conscious effort in our faith is the measure of our faith's weakness. When faith has become a spontaneity of our character, when it turns to G.o.d instinctively, when it does its work with the involuntariness of habit, then it has become strong.

_Pour out your heart before Him._ How this singer understood the office and privilege of the 'all times' trust! He knew that there is a fullness of heart that is ill to bear. True, in more than one simple way the full heart can find some slight relief. There is work. The full heart can go out and do something. There is a brother's trouble in which a man may partly forget his own. There is sympathy. Surely few are so lonely that they cannot find any one ready to offer the gift of the listening ear, any one willing to share with them all of pain and burden that can be shared. Ah! but what of that which cannot be shared? What of the sorrow that has no language, and the shame and confusion that we would not, and even dare not, trail across a friend's mind? So often the heart holds more than ever should be poured out into another's ear. There are in life strained silences that we could not break if we would. And there is a law of reticence that true love and unselfishness will always respect. If my brother hath joy, am I to cloud it with my grief? If he hath sorrow, am I to add my sorrow unto his? When our precious earthly fellows.h.i.+p has been put to its last high uses in the hour of sorrow or shame, the heart has still a burden for which this world finds no relief. But there is another fellows.h.i.+p. There is G.o.d our Father. There is the ear of Heaven. We may be girt with silence among our fellows, but in looking up the heart finds freedom. In His Presence the voice of confession can break through the gag of shame, and the pent-up tide of trouble can let itself break upon the heart of Eternal Love.

_G.o.d is a refuge for us._ That is the great discovery of faith. That is the merciful word that comes to be written so plainly in the life that has formed the habit of faith. G.o.d our refuge. It may be that to some the word 'refuge' suggests the occasional rather than the constant need of life. But the refuge some day and the faith every day are linked together. A thing is no use to you if you cannot find it when you want it. And you cannot find it easily if it be not at hand. The peasant built his cottage under the shadow of his lord's castle walls. In the hour of peril it was but a step to the strong fortress. 'Trust in Him at all times.' Build your house under the walls of the Eternal Help. Live in the Presence. Find the att.i.tude of faith, and the act of faith will be simple. Trust in Him through every hour, and when a tragic hour comes one step shall take you into the innermost safety.

III.

THE ONE THING DESIRABLE

One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in His temple.

Ps. xxvii. 4.

_I have desired ... I will seek._ Amid the things that are seen, desire and quest are nearly always linked closely together. The man who desires money seeks after money. The desire of the world is often disappointed, but it is rarely supine. It is dynamic. It leads men. True, it leads them astray; but that is a reflection on its wisdom and not on its effectiveness. Among what we rightly call the lower things men do not play with their desires, they obey them. But amid the unseen realities of life it is often quite otherwise. In the religious life desire is sometimes strangely ineffective.

It is static, if that be not a contradiction in terms. In many a life-story it stands written: One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I dream of, that will I hope for, that will I wait for. Many things help to explain this att.i.tude, and, explaining it, they condemn it also. We allow our surroundings to pa.s.s judgement on our longings. We bring the eternal to the bar of the hour, and postpone the verdict. Or it may be in the worldliness of our hearts we admit the false plea of urgency and the false claim of authority made by our outward life. And perhaps more commonly the soul lacks the courage of its desires. It costs little to follow a desire that goes but a little way, and that on the level of familiar effort and within sight of familiar things. It is another thing to hear the call of the mountains and to feel the fascination of some far and glittering peak. That is a call to perilous and painful effort. And yet again, high desire sometimes leaves life where it found it because the heart attaches an intrinsic value to vision. It is something to have _seen_ the Alpine heights of possibility. Yes, it is something, but what is it? It is a golden hour to the man who sets out to the climb; it is an hour of shame and judgement, hereafter to be manifest, to the man who clings to the comforts of the valley.

_One thing have I desired._ When a man speaks thus unto us, we have a right to ponder his words with care. We naturally become profoundly interested, expectant, and, to the limit of our powers, critical. If a man has seen one thing that he can call simply and finally the desire of his heart, it ought to be worth looking at. We expect something large, lofty, inclusive. And we find this: '_That I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in His temple._' Let us examine this desire, And, first of all, we must free our minds from mere literalism. If we do not, we shall find in this desire many things that are not in it, and miss everything that is in it. This is not the longing for a cloistered life, the confession of one who is weary of this heavy world, doubtful of its promises and afraid of its powers. 'The house of the Lord'

is not a place, but a state, not an edifice, but an att.i.tude. It is a fair and unseen dwelling-place builded by the hands of G.o.d to be the home, here and hereafter, of all the hearts that purely love and wors.h.i.+p Him. We read of one who, a day's march from his father's house, lay down and slept; and in his sleep G.o.d spake to him, and lo, out in a wild and lonely place, Jacob said, 'This is none other but the house of G.o.d.' For every one to whom the voice of G.o.d has come, and who has listened to that voice and believed in its message, the mountains and valleys of this fair world, the breath of every morning and the hush of every evening, are instinct with a Presence. Wordsworth dwelt in the house of the Lord all the days of his life. And if the wonder and beauty of the earth lift up our hearts unto our G.o.d in praise and wors.h.i.+p, we dwell there also.

Yes, but this world is a world of men. In city or on hillside the great persistent fact for us, the real setting of our life, is not nature, but humanity. Life is not a peaceful vision of earthly beauty. Our experience is not a dreamy pastoral. There are shamed and broken lives. The world is full of greed and hate and warfare and sorrow. Nature at its best cannot by itself build for us a temple that humanity at its worst, or even at something less than its worst, cannot pull down about our ears. For the Psalmist, probably David himself, the temple was symbolic of all heavenly realities. It stood for the holiness and the nearness and the mercy of G.o.d, and for the sacredness and the possibility of human life. In the light and power and perfect a.s.surance of these things he desired to dwell all the days of his life. For us there is the life and word of One greater than the temple. Jesus of Nazareth dwelt in the house of the Lord. Between Him and G.o.d the Father there was perfect union. And no one ever saw the worth of human life as Jesus saw it. And no one ever measured the sacred values of humanity as He measured them. And now, in the perfect mercy of G.o.d, there is no man but may dwell in the house of G.o.d alway and feel life's sacredness amidst a thousand desecrations, and know its preciousness amidst all that seeks to obscure, defile, and cheapen it.

_To behold the beauty of the Lord._ It is only in the house of the Lord, the unseen fane of reverence, trust, and communion, that a man can learn what beauty is, and where to look for it. Out in the world beauty is held to be a sporadic thing. It is like a flower growing where no one expected a blossom. It is an unrelated and unexplained surprise. It is a green oasis in the desert of unlovely and unpromising things. But for the dweller in the house of the Lord beauty is not on this wise. Said one such dweller, 'The desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose.' He looked across the leagues of burning sand and saw the loveliness of Carmel by the sea, and of Sharon where the lilies grow. To the artist beauty is an incident, to the saint beauty is a law of life. It is the thing that is to be. It is the positive purpose, throbbing and yearning and struggling in the whole universe. When it emerges and men behold it, they behold the face of truth; and if it emerges not, it is still there, the fundamental fact and the vital issue of human life. To dwell in the Divine Presence by faith and obedience; to live so near to G.o.d that you can see all about yourself and every human soul the real means of life, and straight before you the real end of life; to know that though so often the worst is man's dark choice, yet ever the best is his true heritage; and to learn to interpret the whole of life in the terms of G.o.d's saving purpose,--this is to behold the beauty of the Lord.

_And to inquire in His temple._ The Psalmist desired for himself an inward att.i.tude before G.o.d that should not only reveal unto him the eternal fitness of all G.o.d's ways and the eternal grace of all His purposes, but should also put him in the way of solving the various problems that arise to try the wisdom and strength of men's lives. Sometimes the first court of appeal in life, and always the last, is the temple court. When all the world is dumb, a voice speaks to them that wors.h.i.+p. Reverential love never loses its bearings. In this world we need personal and social guidance, and there must be many times when both shall be wanting unless we have learned to carry the burden of our ignorance to the feet of the Eternal Wisdom. And perhaps a man can desire no better thing for himself than that the reverence and devotion of his life should be such as to make the appeal to G.o.d's perfect arbitrament an easy thing.

IV.