At the beautiful gate and other songs of faith / Lucy Larcom [electronic text]

DRAWING NEARER.

ARE we daily drawing nearer Thee, the Perfect, the Unseen? Grows the pathway ever clearer, Stretching sense and God between? Thine own messengers beside us Wait, wherever we may be; Earth and heaven are met, to guide us Nearer unto Thee.

In the web of beauty's weaving, In the picture and the song; In our dreaming and believing, By our friendships borne along; By our own heart's human story, By the light on land and sea, Glimpsing unimagined glory, Draw we nearer Thee?

In our doings and ambitions, Heaping gold and probing thought; In crude science, worn traditions, Finds the spirit what it sought? In the tumult of the nations, Surging like a shoreward sea, Are Thy sundered congregations Gathering unto Thee?

With the footsteps of the ages, Are we drawing nearer Thee? Beautiful upon Time's pages Will our name and record be? Year on year of worthier living Add we to life's glorious sum? — Through our failures, Thy forgiving, Lord, Thy kingdom come!

Over fallen towers of error, Laid by our own hands in dust; Past the ghosts of doubt and terror; Out of sloth's in-eating rust; From Gomorrah's lurid smouldering, Borders of the drear Dead Sea; Graves where selfish loves lie mouldering, Fly we unto Thee.

Vain a secret hoard to carry From our ruined house of pride; Weights that hinder, fiends that harry, Are the idols that we hide.

Draw us rather by the sweetness Of Thy breath in living things To Thyself, with unclogged fleetness Lifted, as on wings!

Dogmas into truth transmuting, Fusing differences in love; Creed and rite no more disputing, Closing rank and file we move; Leaving our dead Past behind us, Turning not, nor looking back: May no wayside glimmer blind us To the one straight track!

Brother hastening unto brother, Youth rewakening in our eyes, Loving Thee and one another, Find we our lost Paradise. Where the heart is, there the treasure; Led by paths we cannot see Unto heights we cannot measure, Draw we nearer Thee!

Nearer Thee, through every aeon, Every universe of Thine! Man and seraph swell one paean, Harmonizing chords divine. Thine from Thee no power can sever; Through death's veil Thy face they see; Saved, forever and forever Drawing nearer Thee!