nce thee about with
the ministry of His Spirit, and give thee grace to know, everywhere and
always, that thou art in this world to live for His kingdom of love and
truth and to grow a soul.

_The Lord, shall keep ... thy coming in._ It might seem to some that once a
man was safely across the threshold of his home he might stand in less need
of this promise of help. But experience says otherwise. The world has
little respect for any man's threshold. It is capable of many a bold and
shameless intrusion. The things that harass a man as he earns his tread
sometimes haunt him as he eats it. No home is safe unless faith be the
doorkeeper. 'In peace will I both lay me down and sleep, for Thou, Lord,
alone makest me to dwell in safety.' The singer of that song knew that, as
in the moil of the world, so also in the shelter of the place he named his
dwelling-place, peace and safety were not of his making, but of God's
giving.

Sometimes there is a problem and a pain waiting for a man across his own
threshold. Many a man can more easily look upon the difficulties and perils
of the outer world than he can come in and look into the pain-lined face of
his little child. If we cannot face alone the hostilities on one side of
our threshold we cannot face alone the intimacies on the other side of it.
After all, life is whole and continuous. Whatever the changes in the
setting of life, there is no respite from living. And that means there is
no leisure from duty, no rest from the service of obedience, no cessation
in the working of all those forces by means of which, or in spite of which,
life is ever being fashioned and fulfilled.

And now let us free our minds from the literalism of this promise and get a
glimpse of its deeper application to our lives. The threshold of the home
does not draw the truest division-line in life between the outward and the
inward. Life is made up of thought and action, of the manifest things and
the hidden things.

'Thy going out.' That is, our life as it is manifest to others, as it has
points of contact with the world about us. We must go out. We must take up
some attitude toward all other life. We must add our word to the long human
story and our touch to the fashioning of the world. We need the pledge of
divine help in that life of ours in which, for their good or ill, others
must have a place and a part. 'And thy coming in'--into that uninvaded
sanctum of thought. Did we say uninvaded? Not so. In tha