"How will it be When you at last in heaven we see-- Dear souls, whose footsteps in lost days Made musical earth's toil-worn ways, While we not half the loneliness That bound you to our side could guess? Where angels know your footfall we Are fain to be.
"We never knew-- So heedlessly we walked with you-- The drops we jostled from your cup, That spilt, could not be gathered up; We might have given you foam and glow From our own beaker's overflow; Ah! what we might have been to you We never knew.
"We might have lent Such strength, such comfort and content To you, out of our ample store; We might have hastened on before To lift the shadows from your way, Darkened, ere noon, to twilight's gray; With earth's chilled air love's warm heart-scent We might have blent.
"Dear, wistful eyes, Ye haunt us with your kind surprise, Your tender wonder that a heart Should thus be left alone, apart, So loving, so misunderstood By us, in our self-centred mood: Alas! in vain to you arise Our longing cries.
"Oh, will you wait For us beyond the shining gate? Though lovely gifts behind you left, We want yourselves; we are bereft. From your new mansion glorious Will you lean out to look for us? Shut is the far-off, shining gate-- Are we too late?"
These are but illustrations. The same is true in all phases of life. Every day doors are opened for us which we do not enter. For a little time they stand open with bidding and welcome, and then they are closed, to be opened no more forever. To every one of us along our years there come opportunities, which, if accepted and improved, would fit us for worthy character, and for noble, useful living, and lead us in due time to places of honor and blessing. But how many of us there are who reject these opportunities and lose the good they brought for us from God! Then one by one the doors are shut, cutting off the proffered favors while we go on unblessed.
There is another closing of doors which is even sadder than any of those which have been suggested. There is a shutting of our own heart's door upon God himself. He stands at our gate and knocks and there are many who never open to him at all, and many more who open the door but slightly. The latter, while they may receive blessing, yet miss the fulness of divine revealing which would flood their souls with love; the former miss altogether the sweetest benediction of life.
"He that shuts Love out in turn shall be Shut out from Love, and on his threshhold lie Howling in outer darkness. Nor for this Was common clay made from the common earth, Moulded by God and tempered with the tears Of angels to the perfect shape of man."
This sad sound of closing doors, as it falls day after day upon our soul's ears, proclaims to us continually that something which was ours, which was sent to us from God, and for which we shall have to answer in judgment, is ours no longer, is shut away forever from our grasp. It is a sad picture--the five virgins standing at midnight before a closed door through which they might have entered to great joy and honor, but which to all their wild importunity will open no more. It is sad, yet many of us are likewise standing before closed doors, doors that once stood open to us, but into which we entered not, languidly loitering outside until the sound of the shutting fell upon our ear as the knell of hopeless exclusion:--
"Too late! Too late! Ye cannot enter now!"
Of course the past is irreparable and irrevocable, and it may seem idle to vex ourselves in thinking about doors now closed, that no tears, no prayers, no loud knockings, can ever open again. Yes; yet the future remains. The years that are gone we cannot get back again, but new years are yet before us. They too will have their open doors. Shall we not learn wisdom as we look back upon the irrevocable past and make sure that in the future we shall not permit God's doors of opportunity to shut in our faces?