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 irrevocable, and it may seem idle to vex ourselves in thinking about doors now closed, that no tears, no prayers, no loud knockings, can ever open again.

Yes; yet the future remains.

The years that are gone we cannot get back again, but new years are yet before us.