The Harvest of a Quiet Eye: Leisure Thoughts for Busy Lives - John Richard Vernon

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But now they cannot go back, for they are too nigh to the unseen One, and His words have sunk deeply within them. Day by day they are giving up their old waking dreams; things they have pictured out and acted over in their imaginations and their hopes, one by one they let them go, with saddened but willing hearts. They feel as if they had fallen under some irresistible attraction, which is hurrying them into the world unseen; and so in truth it is. He is fulfilling to them His promise: ‘And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto Me.’ Their turn is come at last, that is all. Before, they had only heard of the mystery; now, they feel it. He has fastened on them His look of love, even as on Peter and on Mary; and they cannot choose but follow, and in following Him, altogether forget both themselves and all their visions of life.”

      How strange it is, verily, after we have for many years now, followed that Voice—followed it, no doubt, with many a declension, many a wavering, many a wayward swerving, and almost turning back; yet, on the whole, followed it, and that with less of timidity, and more of implicitness, as experience justified hope;—how strange, about midway in the journey, to look back at life’s threshold! The January of infancy had past; the February of awakening, conscious life had come, and we came out from our dormant state, and paused upon the threshold, and looked forth upon the world. And now we look back, and with a strange, wondering interest, contemplate that single lonely figure that was ourself, leaning in wrapt musing; the small home behind it; and before, the siren murmurs, and warm, flattering airs of the fairy, enticing Future. The magic dreams, the mirage-reveries, the profuse promises, the unshaped hopes, the just-caught notes of some divine, distant melody: all the flowers to blossom; and all the birds to come. Ah, what sweet, wild musings were those! Far away we seemed to catch a gleam of that

      “Light that never was on sea or land,

       The consecration, and the poet’s dream.”

      And even tears had their sparkle, and melancholy its charm, and death its unreal beauty.

      “To think of passing bells, of death and dying—

       ’Twere good, methought, in early youth to die,

       So loved, lamented: in such sweet sleep lying,

       The white shroud all with flowers and rosemary

       Stuck o’er by loving hands.”

      Thus, we remember, once stood that figure, solitary in its own individuality, upon the threshold, and looking out upon life. And, contemplating our present self, we feel that it is “the same, yet not the same.” How changed all has become! It is not only nor chiefly that flowers are less valued than fruit-germs, or sparkling glass than rough, hereafter-to-be-cut diamonds; it is not only, nor so much, that the world’s promises and life’s young dreams have failed us, as that we have turned away from them. That our taste has altered; that the things that then were all, are now nearly nothing; that what once rose before us a golden mirage, seems now as but bare sand; that what seemed gain, would be now held as loss; that what seemed too rare, and delicious, and high, and exquisite, and sublime, for more than trembling hope, has now become as refuse in our thought.

      Time was, when other thoughts and purposes than these which now possess us, held sway in our hearts. Time was, when we stood on the threshold, dazzled, and wondering, in a delicious dream, which of all the sublime or lovely paths that opened before us we should pursue. Time was, when at last we began to heed a kind, but still small Voice, that had from the first been speaking to us; when a grave Eye that had from the first watched us, at last fixed our attention. Time was, when we were compelled as it were, at first with hesitating, reluctant step, to follow that Voice and that Look—away from those bright gay paths, or grand aspiring ways, down a lowly, narrow way, strewn with thorns and stones, and sloping into a mist-hid valley. Time was—if we followed still—that the disturbing, distracting sounds and sights above being left behind and hushed—the mist lifted, and, lo! the valley was a pleasant valley, an abode of “peace that the world cannot give”: and if the way were still rough sometimes, there were undying flowers of unearthly beauty here and there; and if the lark was away, the nightingale was singing; and it was answered to us, yea, our heart returned answer to itself, that, albeit narrow and strait at first, the name of that way was, in very truth, the Way of Pleasantness and the Path of Peace.

      Ah, yes, if once we, with purpose of heart, set ourselves to follow His guiding, how God draws us on! We clutch at this, and would rest at that; and surely this is the Chief good, and the Ideal beauty? But no; the early flowers depart, and the late, and we leave the threshold and wander on; and February goes, and March goes, and even June, and August; and sorrowfully and wonderingly we look up at God, following Him on through life, even into the grave September, and the hushed October, and the tearful November; and so into the winter of alienation from the world, which death’s snow comes to seal.

      But ere this we have found out His meaning in life, and the flowers of earth are no more regretted; and there is no point at which we would choose to have rested, now that we look back upon the past experiences and events of the journey; and both our hands are laid in His, and we look up with unutterable trust and ineffable love. It was not so once:

      “I was not ever thus, nor prayed that Thou

       Wouldst lead me on;

       I loved to see and choose my path, but now

       Lead Thou me on.”

      And then He has led you, little by little, with gentle steps, hiding the full length of the way that you must tread, lest you should start aside in fear, and faint for weariness. And as it has been, so it must be; onward you must go; He will not leave you here; there is yet in store for you more contrition, more devotion, more delight in Him. A few years hence, and you will see how true these words are. If by that time you have not forsaken Him, you will be nigher still, walking in strange, it may be solitary paths, in ways that are “called desert”; but knowing Him, as now you know Him not, with a fulness of knowledge, and a bowing of heart, and a holy self-renouncement, and a joy that you are altogether His. What now seems too much, shall then seem all too little; what too nigh, not nigh enough to His awful cross. Oh, how our thoughts change! A few years ago, and you would have thought your present state excessive and severe; you would have shrunk from it then, as at this time you shrink from the hereafter. But now you look back, and know that all was well. In all your past life you would not have one grief the less, or one joy the more. It is all well.

      And so it is, then, that we are led on from our February threshold, on through the maturing, decaying months, until the silent Winter comes. And what then? Is it to be the same over again—the same promises and disappointments, the same dreams and awakenings, the same unreal glory at the threshold, and the same gradual weaning from it on the journey?

      Not so. To us the years are not repeated, nor is the “second life, only the first renewed.”

      “I know not, oh, I know not

       What joys await us there;

       What radiancy of glory,

       What bliss beyond compare.”

      But I love to wander, nevertheless, in my musings far beyond the journey to the Land whither the journey is tending. Beyond this state of probation to that of fruition; beyond striving, to attainment; beyond discipline, to perfection; beyond warfare, to victory; beyond labour, to rest; beyond constant slips and shortcomings, and half-heartedness at best, to stedfast holiness; beyond the cross, to the crown. We are yet within doors: oh, what will open before us on the threshold of that next year!—when the first wonder of its January has passed, and the amazed and almost dizzied soul has straightened and uncrumpled its wings, and collected its powers, and can calmly begin to understand its change, and to muse on its future, and to grasp the idea of the possession upon which it has come: to anticipate the endless succession of amaranthine flowers, ever increasing in glory throughout the months of Eternity, and the songs that shall ever throng more and more abundant and ecstatic, and never migrate nor pass away!

      On the Threshold. Those in Paradise are now musing on the threshold, waiting for their full consummation and bliss both in body and soul, waiting for that coming

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