?
Though lovely gifts behind you left,
We want yourselves; we are bereft.
From your new mansion glorious
Will you lean out to look for us?
Shut is the far-off, shining gate--
Are we too late?"

These are but illustrations. The same is true in all phases of life.
Every day doors are opened for us which we do not enter. For a little
time they stand open with bidding and welcome, and then they are
closed, to be opened no more forever. To every one of us along our
years there come opportunities, which, if accepted and improved, would
fit us for worthy character, and for noble, useful living, and lead us
in due time to places of honor and blessing. But how many of us there
are who reject these opportunities and lose the good they brought for
us from God! Then one by one the doors are shut, cutting off the
proffered favors while we go on unblessed.

There is another closing of doors which is even sadder than any of
those which have been suggested. There is a shutting of our own
heart's door upon God himself. He stands at our gate and knocks and
there are many who never open to him at all, and many more who open the
door but slightly. The latter, while they may receive blessing, yet
miss the fulness of divine revealing which would flood their souls with
love; the former miss altogether the sweetest benediction of life.

"He that shuts Love out in turn shall be
Shut out from Love, and on his threshhold lie
Howling in outer darkness. Nor for this
Was common clay made from the common earth,
Moulded by God and tempered with the tears
Of angels to the perfect shape of man."

This sad sound of closing doors, as it falls day after day upon our
soul's ears, proclaims to us continually that something which was ours,
which was sent to us from God, and for which we shall have to answer in
judgment, is ours no longer, is shut away forever from our grasp. It
is a sad picture--the five virgins standing at midnight before a closed
door through which they might have entered to great joy and honor, but
which to all their wild importunity will open no more. It is sad, yet
many of us are likewise standing before closed doors, doors that once
stood open to us, but into which we entered not, languidly loitering
outside until the sound of the shutting fell upon our ear as the knell
of hopeless exclusion:--

"Too late! Too late! Ye cannot enter now!"

Of course the past is irreparable and