The Threshold Grace Part 3

These words are the transcript of a mood. The writer is not unfolding to us any of the deep persistent longings of his spirit; he is telling us of a thought that shadowed his soul for an hour. Let us look into this mood of his. It is not his in any unique or even peculiar sense. In moods, as in manners, history is wont to repeat itself. The writer of this poem has voiced one of the great common experiences of humanity. But let us be quite clear as to what that experience really is. Let us not be misled by the music and the seeming unworldliness of these words about winged flight from a world of trouble and strife. The Psalmist was not looking heavenward, but earthward, when this plea for wings broke from his heart. He was moved to speak as he did, not by the surpa.s.sing charm of a heavenly vision, but by the dark unrest of the earthly outlook. The emphatic note here is that of departure, not of destination. It is necessary to remind ourselves that this is so, for these words have become the cla.s.sic of the home-sick soul.

They have been used to voice the farthest and most truly divine desires of the human heart. And by virtue of such use they have gathered a meaning which was not theirs at the beginning. At that meaning we will presently look, but let us first of all look at this longing as it stands in the psalm and as it represents an experience that is threaded through the history of humanity.

_Oh that I had wings ... then would I fly away._ Here the idea of fleeing away suggests itself as a possible solution of life; and whenever it comes to a man like this it is a source of weakness. It is not a desire to find the joys of heaven; it is a desire to escape the pains of earth. There is no vista, no wistful distance, no long, alluring prospect. The soul is hemmed in by its enemies, crushed down by its burdens, beset on all sides by the frets of the earthly lot; and there comes a vague desire to be out of it all. It is not aspiration, it is evasion. It is not response to the ideal, it is recoil from the actual. It is not the spell of that which shall be that is upon the soul, but the irksomeness or the dreadfulness of that which is. This is a mood that awaits us all. No man faces life as it should be faced, but some can hardly be said to face it at all. Their face is ever turned towards a seductive vision of quietness. The solution of life for them is not in a fight, but in a retreat. Of course we know there is 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 man who wants victory and the man who merely wants a cessation of hostilities.

This plea for wings does not necessarily betoken 'a desire to depart.' It rather indicates a desire to remain under more favourable and comfortable conditions. Such a mood is not the highest and the healthiest experience of the 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 to face the duty of taking life up. The secret of enervation is found not in the poverty of our resources, but in the cowardliness and selfishness of our att.i.tude towards life. The battle is half won when we have looked the enemy in the face. The burden is the better borne as we stoop under the full weight of it.

_Oh that I had wings like a dove!_ That is a short-sighted and a selfish desire. Supposing you had wings, what would you do? Fly away from the moil of the world and find rest and shelter for yourself? Is that the best and n.o.blest thing to desire to do? After all, we know other and loftier moods than this. We know that staying is better than going when there is so much to stay for. We know that working is better than resting when there is so much to do. We have something better to think about than a quiet lodgement in the wilderness, we who live in a world where the strength of our hands and the warmth of our hearts count for something. To give your tired brother a lift is a vastly more profitable occupation than sitting at the roadside and wis.h.i.+ng you could fly. Man, you ought to be glad that you can walk--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 never taken any one to heaven, but it has made them less useful upon earth. The breath of this desire is able to blight the flowers of social service. No one would be foolish enough to indict suburbanism as a mode of life. The day must surely come when few or none will dwell in the smoke-grimed heart of the city. But in as far as a man seeks the fairest suburb open to him in order that he may see little of, and think little of, 'the darkness of the terrible streets,' then the very life that restores health to his body shall sow seeds of disease in his soul.

There is only one way to rest, and that lies right through the heart of the world's work and pain. Rest is not for those who flee away from life's difficulties, but for those who face them. 'Take my yoke ... and ye shall find rest.' It were not well for our own sakes that we had wings. It were not well for us to be able to avoid the burden-bearing and the tale of tired days, for G.o.d has hidden the secret of our rest in the heart of our toiling. They who come unto the City of G.o.d come there not by the easy flight 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 of more than the weariness of a world-worn spirit, or the thinly disguised selfishness of one who fears to pay the price of life.

When the long working-day of life is wearing away its last hours and verging towards the great stillness, the voices of time fall but faintly on the ear, the adorations and ideals and fas.h.i.+ons and enthusiasms of the world come to mean little to a man who in his day has followed them as eagerly as any, and the heart within him asks only for rest.

G.o.d, 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 feels that for him life has said its last word and shown its last wonder and uttered its last benediction, the desire for rest is a pure and spiritually normal thing; it is just the soul's gaze turned upward where

beyond these toils G.o.d 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 place in a strenuous life. As a tired woman pauses amid her tasks and looks out of her cottage window to take into her heart the quiet beauty of the woods where she knows the ground is fair with lilies, so do we find ourselves looking out of life's small cas.e.m.e.nt and thinking upon the fresh, free, 'outdoor' life the soul will some day live. And such a mood as this is surely a sign of the soul's growth, a testimony of its responsiveness to the divine touch, a sudden sense of its splendid destiny borne in upon it among the grey and narrow circ.u.mstances 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 vexed 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 of all, and most obviously, the appeal concerns the contents of the song. It reminds us of the duty of making our grateful acknowledgement of G.o.d's goodness 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 bringing up 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 to attempt the impossible is perhaps more worthy of being heeded than the form in which it is presented to us might lead some to suppose. There is no getting away from the simple fact that a man's thankfulness has a real and proportionate relations.h.i.+p to the things for which he has cause to be thankful. If in our daily life the phrase 'the goodness of G.o.d' is to have a deepening and c.u.mulative significance, it must be informed and vitalized continually by an alert and responsive recognition of the forms in which that goodness is ever freshly manifested to us. Whilst the roots of the tree of praise lie deep beneath the surface, and wind their thousand ways into dim places where memory itself cannot follow them, yet surely the leaves of the tree are fresher and greener for rain that even now has left its reviving touch upon them, and for the suns.h.i.+ne that is even now stirring the life in all their veins. The figure is imperfect. We are not trees. We do not respond automatically to all the gracious and cheering ministries of the Eternal Goodness in our lives. We may easily overlook many a good gift of our G.o.d. And though in our forgetfulness and unthankfulness we profit by the sunlight and the dew and by each tender thought of G.o.d for His creatures, yet the full and perpetual profit of all good things is for each of us bound up with the power to see them, the wisdom to appraise them, the mindfulness that holds them fast, and the heart that sings out its thanksgiving for them. 'O sing unto the Lord a new song.' Bring this day's life into the song. Bring the gift that has come to thee this very hour into the song. Look about thee. See if there be but one more flower springing at the path-side. See if the bud of yesterday has but unfolded another leaf. Behold the loaf on thy table, feel the warmth of thy hearth, yea, feel the very life within thee that woke again and stirred itself with the morning light, and say these gifts are like unto the gifts of yesterday, but they are not yesterday's gifts. Yesterday's bread is broken, and yesterday's fire is dead, and yesterday's strength is spent. O G.o.d, Thy mercies are new every morning! So shall a new song break from the heart.

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 generalizing makes for a barren heart. The specific has a vital place in the ministry of praise. It is true that the highest flights of praise always carry the soul beyond any conscious reckoning with the details of its experience.

Tabulation is not the keystone of the arch of thanksgiving. But to behold the specific goodness of G.o.d in each day's life, to review the hours and to say to one's own soul, Thus and thus hath my G.o.d been mindful of me, is perhaps the surest and the simplest way to deepen and vitalize the habit of praise in our life, and to set the new notes ringing in our psalm of thanksgiving.

But in this appeal for a new song of praise to G.o.d there is something more than a recognition of new blessings. The new song is not merely the response to new mercies and the tuneful celebration of recent good. If there is to be ever a new note in the song, there must be ever a new note in the singer's heart. And this cometh not by observation, but by inspiration. You may change the words of the song and it may still be the old song. You may sing the same words and it may yet be a new song. For as is the singer, so is the song.

_O sing unto the Lord a new song._ That is a plea for a deeper and a wider life. It is a plea that sounds the depth of the heart and takes the measure of the soul. The new song comes not of a truer enumeration of life's blessings, but of a truer understanding of the blessedness of life itself.

The key to such understanding is character. When by the grace of the clean heart and the enlightened and responsive spirit a man can get beneath the events of each day's life and commune with that eternal law of love to which each one of those events bears some relation--or had we not better say commune with the Eternal Father by whom that law exists?--then is his song of praise ever new. It is something to catch a glimpse of the mercy of G.o.d, and to think and feel as one has not thought or felt before about some part of life's daily good. But it is vastly more to learn to interpret the whole of life in the terms of the goodness of G.o.d. The saint sings where the worldling sighs. And if we find in that song only the apotheosis of courage and resignation, we have neither found the source of the song nor the message of it. The new song comes not from the thrill of peril faced and defied, nor from the victorious acceptance of hard and bitter things.

It comes from that deep life of the soul in G.o.d, a life beyond the threat of peril and beyond the touch of pain. It finds its deepest and freshest notes not in contemplating the new gains and good of any day, but in a growing 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 not something unto which we may pa.s.s by one effort of the will or that depends upon the stimulus of outward experience. It is conditioned rather by our character, and by our power to see the unveiled face of life reflecting always the light of perfect love. And it is to produce in us the right character and the true insight that G.o.d disciplines us all our days. It is to set a new song in our hearts. Said a professor of music at Leipzig of a girl whom he had trained for some years and who was the pride of the Conservatoire, 'If only some one would marry her and ill-treat her and break her heart she would be the finest singer in Europe.' He missed something in the song, and knew it could never come there save from the heart of the singer. Trouble always strikes a new note in life, and often the deepest note that is ever struck. But, be our experience joyous or sorrowful, the true end of it must ever be to deepen our own hearts that there 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 the true 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 we have never possessed, and may possess that which we can never recall. And it is out of that which we have _become_ by G.o.d's grace, rather than out of that 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 seeking something more than a new power to behold what good things each day brings us, a readier way of reckoning the wealth of the pa.s.sing hours. We are seeking for a larger life in G.o.d, and for a spirit able, as it were, to secrete from every experience its hidden meed of everlasting blessing. For if the heart grow purer, the will stronger, the vision clearer, the judgement truer--indeed, if there come to the soul each day some increase of life--it shall surely find its way into living praise. And a living song is always a new song.