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 of the Lord with regard to which they are still crying out, “How long?” and are bid to “rest yet for a little season.” And so then they rest, and wait upon the threshold, and contemplate the mighty and magnificent panorama outspread before them as their Future. The Voice is still there, and the Look; and they wait its summons, to leave the threshold, and to follow once again. But how different that following then! How far other than of old that summons! Not to paths of humiliation and discipline, and hills of difficulty, and valleys of shadow, but to realms of brightness and beauty unspeakable, and to heights to which earth’s ambitions never soared. From the threshold of blessedness into the domain of glory; from Abraham’s bosom to the throne of the Lamb; from a star to the Sun in His strength.
And so may we think of our dead that fell asleep in Jesus, as waiting upon that blessed threshold, contemplating that ravishing prospect, which is theirs, and may be ours. Nor do we enough thus think of and realise the state of the departed. The poisonous fungi of error have made us shy of the mushroom of truth. “The superstition of ages past has recoiled into the sadduceeism of to-day.” And so we, the dying, compassionate those who have begun to live, and who stand upon the threshold of the yet higher and more perfect life of the resurrection. Let us think of them more nobly, more worthily, more truly. Let us not heap their burial with gloom; let not our souls dwell with their bodies under the sodden clay. They are changed, but they are not lost; they are “still the same, and yet are not what they were; they have passed from the humiliation of the body to the majesty of the spirit. The weakness, and the littleness, and the abasement of life are gone; they are now excellent in strength, full of heavenly light, ardent with love, above fallen humanity, akin to angels.” “Blessed and happy dead!--great and mighty dead! In them the work of the new creation is well-nigh accomplished; what feebly stirs in us, in them is well-nigh full. They have passed within the vail, and there remaineth only one more change for them,--a change full of a foreseen, foretasted bliss. How calm, how pure, how sainted are they now! A few short years ago, and they were almost as weak and poor as we; burdened with the dying body we now bear about; harassed by temptations, often overcome, weeping in bitterness of soul, struggling with faithful, though fearful hearts, towards that dark shadow from which they shrank, as we shrink now.”