The Premonitions of Divine Grace

s Jesus sent messengers before His face.’ — Luxn ix. 52.

EVERYTHING in the world has premonitory symptoms — messengers whom it sends beforehand to tell of its coming. All things predict themselves before they appear. There are days in the spring which prefigure the summer; there are days in the child which prefigure the man. Grace, too, has its prognostics — its anticipative swallows. There are birds whose flight predicts a storm; but there are also birds whose flight predicts a calm. When Christ is coming to the soul there is always a preliminary movement of wings — the wings of the spirit. Does not He tell us Himself that the sign of His coming will be swift movement — unrest, “As the lightning cometh out of the east and shineth even unto the west, even so shall the coming of the Son

of Man be.” And is it not true to man’s experience? Is not unrest ever the premonitory symptom of the spiritual dawn? It is so even with intellectual dawn; I revolt from the old long before I have a sight of the new. But in the sphere of grace it is specially so. There are hundreds of people still outside the higher life who have yet become weary of the lower. They have not seen over the wall, but they have struck against the wall. They have found the world too small for them — not a bad place but an inadequate place. They want, not less of it, but more — more fellowship, more companionship, more brotherhood, more social intercourse. They are weary of conventionalism, weary of stilted proprieties, weary of counting their own steps. The ball-room offends them, not because it is a ball-room, but because it is a masked room — a place where words are not meant to reveal. The dance offends them, not by its joys, but by its jealousies. They want to reap more pleasure from the world, more gain from gaiety, more freedom from friendship. Their cry is, “Set my feet in a larger room!”

And such cries, O Christ, are Thy messengers to me. They are John Baptist in the wilderness; they tell me Thou art near. They tell me, not that the world is passing away, but that its circumscribedness is passing away. They call me, not to a life of asceticism, but to a life of less asceticism. Through the still air I hear them depreciating the size of my world, tempting me to larger rooms. It is not my love for the creature they condemn; it is the want of it. They ask from me more love for the creature — more service of man. And they ask it because Thou art coming and because the service of man is Thy service. They ask it because Thy love for the creature is boundless. They bid me come out into the world — the big world — Thy world. They bid me leave the villages, the hamlets, the rustic places, and emerge into Thy city of human souls. They bid me quit the masked ball for the unmasked assembly — the general assembly of the first-born and the spirits of the just made perfect and the spirits of the unjust that are still to be purified. My first prophecy of Thy coming is my cry for a larger earth.