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 that inner room of
life there sits Regret with her pale face, and Shame with dust on her
forehead, and Memory with tears in her eyes. It is a pitiable thing at
times, is this our coming in. More than one man has consumed his life in a
flame of activity because he could not abide the coming in. 'The Lord shall
keep ... thy coming in.' That means help for every lonely, impotent, inward
hour of life.

Look at the last word of this promise--'for evermore.' Going out and coming
in for evermore. I do not know how these words were interpreted when very