AT THE GRAVEYARD GATE by Helen M. Smouse

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Mar 23, 1904

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 30, No. 12.

AT THE GRAVEYARD GATE.

By Helen M. Smouse

BY HELEN M. SMOUSE.

WHAT may express the sorrows of this spot? No power of human language. No, ah! no. Such pain may never be congealed in words. Thought can not compass anguish such as here, O Via Dolorosa! Direful depths Of sorrow's frenzy, where the grief-racked soul, Deaf to all sound beside, hears but the roar Of waterspout and billows; tossing yet From depth to depth, in full abandonment.

What may be likened to these heights and depths, Soundless as the great universe of God, That flow unceasing 'round the soul that trusts? Infinitude of comforting and love Yearning to heal! Love that has sacrificed; Compassion flavored with the hyssop-bough Of infinite experience in thine own Specific grief, O loss-wrenched heart, to-day, Slow passing through this gate.

Didst know those drops Of agony were gathered once and drank By One, who all our griefs and sorrows bore, And drained the last dregs of the draught of woe? Bitter is sorrow's way; O, take His hand Who traveled every inch thy feet must press.

Art thou too weak, too numb, to seek a balm E'en if thou wouldst, dear heart made desolate? What of those heights and depths of Father-love? What means it?—"God, with His own blood, has bought"— God purchased with the blood of suffering— Suffering His own in that death of His Son,— The power to heal thy grief as well as sin.

My sympathy flows to thee, stricken one, Tossed and not comforted, yet powerless The human tide to heal. God's sympathy Gathers thee, laves thy wound and soothes the sting. His tender hand will clasp above thine own About the goblet's stem to sup with thee The cup of suffering again. He knows The inmost sorest places of thy hurt. I grieve thy grief; 'tis graven on His hands, Who, in His Shepherd pity, seeks for thee.

And thou, too weak to rise and blind with tears, But feel for Him, just feel for Him and find, Amid the desolations of thy life, Those same hands clasp thine own and draw thee close To that warm breast of tenderness divine.