The Threshold Grace eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 56 pages of information about The Threshold Grace.

The Threshold Grace eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 56 pages of information about The Threshold Grace.
prospect than ever man had who looked seaward from Carmel or across the valleys from the steeps of Libanus.  It was his soul that claimed the prospect.  From the window of the little house of life he saw the light of God lying on the everlasting hills.  That is the real deliverance from the monotony of things.  The man who is weary of life is the man who has not seen it.  The man who is tied to his desk sometimes thinks everything would be right if only he could travel.  But many a man has done the Grand Tour and come back no better contented.  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 cure for 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 gaze contemptuously on the little one-story lodge just inside the park gates, and fail to get a glimpse of the magnificent mansion, with its wealth of adornment and treasure, that lies a mile among the trees.  No wonder that men grow discontented or contemptuous when they mistake the porch for the house.  If a man would understand himself and discover his resources and put his 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 life holds, are linked to the larger life of an eternal world.

That is the true foresight.  They called him a far-seeing man.  How did he get that name?  Well, he made a fortune.  He managed to make use of the ebb and flow of the market, and never once got stranded.  He was shrewd and did some 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 sympathy are dried up in his soul.  He can see as far into the money column as most men, but the financial vista is not very satisfying for those who see it best.  The Gospel of St. John is a sealed book to him, and that is in God’s handwriting and opens the gates of heaven.  Far-seeing?  Why, the man is in a tiny 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 out before him.  He can see the glory of the eternal righteousness beneath his daily duties and the wonder of eternal love in the daily fellowships and fulfilments of the brotherhood.  This is measuring life by the heavenly measurement.  This is the vision we need day by day and at the end of the days.  For interest in some things must wane, and life must become less responsive to all that lies about it, and many an earthly link is broken and many an earthly window is darkened, and the old faces and old ways pass, and the thing the old man cherishes is trodden under foot by the impetuous tread of a new generation, and desire fails.  Then it is well with him whose eyes have already caught glimpses of ‘the King in His beauty,’ and ‘the land that is very far off.’

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The Threshold Grace from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.