This Life and the After Life

“I cannot make it seem a day to dread

When from this dear earth I shall journey out To that still dearer country of the dead,

And join the lost ones so long dreamed about. I love this world; yet I shall love to go And meet the friends who wait for me, I know.

I never stand beside a bier, and see

The seal of death set on some well-loved face,

But that I think, ‘One more to welcome me When I shall cross the intervening space

Between this land and that one over there;

One more to make the strange land beyond seem fair.’”

The continuity of life here and hereafter is a Bible teaching. There is no real break. Jesus said, “Whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.” St. Paul spoke of his death as his departure from earth, as if he were going to another country. He referred to Christians gone as “absent from the body, and at home with the Lord.” We should try to be Christians in our thought about dying. The trouble is that we so associate all our friend’s life with his body, that when it lies before us cold and lifeless, all of our friend seems to have ceased to be. But the body is not, never was, our friend. It may be cold, and our friend be living in rich and beautiful life. These truths are put very clearly in some lines of Sir Edwin Arnold’s on the death of Abdallah: —

Faithful friends! It lies, I know,
Pale and white and cold as snow
And ye say, “Abdallah’s dead!”
Weeping at the feet and head,
I can see your falling tears,
I can hear your sighs and prayers;
Yet I smile and whisper this, — “/ am not the thing you kiss;
Cease your tears, and let it lie;
It was mine, it is not I.”

Sweet friends! What the women lave
For its last bed of the grave,
Is a hut which I am quitting.
Is a garment no more fitting.
Is a cage from which, at last.
Like a hawk my end has passed.

Love the inmate, not the room, —

The wearer, not the garb, — the plume

Of the falcon, not the bars

Which kept him from these splendid stars.

Loving friends! Be M^ise, and dry
Straightway every weeping eyej
What ye lift upon the bier
Is not worth a wistful tear.
‘Tis an empty seashell, — one
Out of which the pearl is gone;
The shell is broken, it lies there,
The pearl, the all, the soul, is here.
‘Tis an earthen jar whose lid
Allah sealed, the while it hid
That treasure of his treasury
A mind that loved him; let it lie.
Let the shard be earth’s once more,
Since the gold shines in his store!

Life hereafter will not be so different from life here as we sometimes imagine it will be. We shall go on with living in the other world very much as if nothing had happened. Dying is an experience we need not trouble ourselves much about if we are true believers in Christ. There is a mystery about it; but when we have passed through it we shall probably find that it is a natural and very simple event, perhaps but little more serious than sleeping over night and waking in the, morning. It will not hurt us in any way. It will not blot out any beautiful thing in our life. It will end nothing that is worth while. The things we have loved here, we shall continue to love. The things we have learned to do well, we shall probably continue to do, at least in some form. Dying is just going out to test our learning here, and to live out our lessons. As Robert Browning says: —

I go to prove my soul!

I see my way as birds their trackless way.

I shall arrive: what time, what circuit first

I ask not;

In some time — His good time —

I shall arrive;

He guides me and the birds.

It is intensely interesting to think of life as immortal — stretching on forever. Dying is not a boundary, but merely an incident in the way. We can plan for work that will go on for a thousand years — ‘for ten thousand years. Life here is short even at the longest. We cannot finish in threescore and ten years the great things we dream of in our best moods. Then, only comparatively a few lives reach this full limit of age. It is but a little that we can do in our short, broken years. We begin things, and we are interrupted in the midst of them. Before they are half finished we are called away to something else, or laid aside by illness, or our life ends, and the work remains incomplete. It is pathetic, when a busy man has been called away suddenly, to go into his office, his study, or his place of work, and see the unfinished things he has left, — the letter half written, the book half read, the column of figures half added up, the picture begun but not completed. Life is full of fragments, the mere beginnings of things. If there were nothing beyond death, little could come of this poor fragmentary living and doing. But when we know that life will go on without serious break through endless years, it puts a new meaning into every noble and worthy beginning. Every right and good thing, however small it may seem, shall live forever.

There is comfort in this for those whose life seems a failure here. There are many such lives. They have been crushed and torn by sorrow, defeated in life’s struggles. They have toiled hard, but misfortune has followed them in everything they have attempted. There will be time enough in the eternal years for such lives to grow into full and perfect beauty.

There are lives which are cut off before any of their powers are developed. A thousand fond hopes gather about them — all a mother’s dreams for her child. Suddenly they are stricken down in infancy or early youth. The bud had not time to open in the short summer. It is lifted away, still folding up in its close-shut calyxes all its possibilities of loveliness, power, and life. Sorrow grieves over the hopes which seem blighted, and cuts on the marble shaft or block some symbol of incompleteness. Yet when we believe in immortality, what matters it,that.”tlie btid did not open and unfold its beauties this side the grave? There will be time enough in immortality for every such life to put forth all its loveliness.

An Easter lily was sent in having on its stem several unopened buds. In a day or two these buds had unfolded, and poured their fragrance upon the air. So will it be with the lives of children and youth who pass from earth to heaven; they will open out in the heavenly warmth until every possibility of their being has reached its best.

There are some good people who lose hope in this world’s disheartenments. Their souls are graves full of buried things. Down into these dark sepulchres have gone early dreams, visions of beauty, sweet thoughts, noble intentions, sacred feelings, and brilliant expectations. They bow in sadness over their dead, saying, “There is no use in my going on. Life is empty for me now. There is nothing left worth living for. Every sweet flower has faded.” Christian faith should dispel any such feeling; Into the grave of Jesus went one evening the sweetest hopes, the holiest loves, the gentlest thoughts, the brightest visions, the fondest dreams of a little company of loyal friends. At that grave, as the sun sank low, weeping ones stood, saying, ‘’All our hearts’ hopes lie buried here — all our joy, all our love.” But three days later that grave was opened, and those buried hopes, joys, and affections were raised up, and lived again in blessed beauty. What the friends of Jesus thought they had lost forever they had not lost at all. Their hearts’ treasures were only buried that they might spring up in immortal beauty. The dull seeds became glorious Easter lilies.

So will it be with all the precious things of Christian faith which seem to perish. In Christ nothing that is good or lovely can be really lost. The dreams of youth which meant so much to us, and which we seem to have lost, — they have served their purpose, and are lost only as blossoms are lost when they fall away to give place to the fruit.

We can lose our beautiful things only in sin. Sin’s grave is deep and dark, and there is no resurrection for the precious things of life which go down into it. And oh, what treasures are buried in this hopeless sepulchre! Innocence, purity of heart, sweet feelings, heavenly yearnings, visions of Christ, hopes of glory, holy affections, the strength and joy of life, possibilities of nobleness, childhood’s faith, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are lovely — what heaps of life’s best things go down into sin’s deep grave! And this grave was never broken open. The stone was never rolled from its door. No vision of angels was ever seen in its dark chamber. What is buried in sin’s grave is hopelessly lost. It never can be gotten back again, though men seek for it diligently with tears. Lost innocence comes twice to none.

But in Christ nothing beautiful or good ever perishes. A little child stooped to catch the sunlight which streamed on the floor. In her dimpled hand she grasped it, and reached and strove for more.

**But the sunbeam would not linger
In that chubby little hand,
Though it lay upon each finger
Like a bright and golden band.

Still, the striving gave her pleasure. And the light yet lingering lies

In most fair and gladsome measure,
In the depth of her blue eyes.”

This is a parable. Though we may noc grasp and hold the very things we strive to reach, there is a blessing in the seeking which itself more than meets the cost; and besides, we get the substance of our quest, though the form eludes us. The holy visions which seem to vanish as we pursue them, really hide in the depth of our heart, and stay there to brighten and enrich our life forever. So it is with all the precious things we cherish for a time and then seem to lose. If they are pure, true, and worthy things, we have not lost them; we never can lose them. Abraham never got the promised land, though he left all to seek it. To the end of his life he journeyed on in his quest, but died a pilgrim still on the way.

Yet in his heart he found better things than he sought, not a country, but the rewards of faith and obedience. There always are good people who pursue hopes and dreams which they never overtake; yet in their souls they find in their quest holier hopes and fairer dreams than those which they miss. Those who seem to fail ofttimes get most out of this world which they can carry to heaven with them.

The same is true of the joys and blessings which we seem to lose out of our hands in life’s vicissitudes. We do not lose them. The material forms of things may drop from our clasp, but the spiritual quality or beauty in them we never can lose. We cannot lose a friend. The mother never can lose her child. A woman of ninety said that her first baby, which had died when she was but a little past twenty, had stayed as a vision of beauty in her heart all the seventy years. We never can lose a mother. Her life is wrought too inextricably with ours ever to be taken out. A pure and tender joy once cherished never can be lost out of our heart. We may feel its thrill no more; that which gave it may have passed out of our life; but a holy joy, once experienced, becomes part of our being, and never can be taken from us.

If the Angelus were lent to you for a few days, and hung in your parlor, and then were removed, you would really have the picture forever. During these few days of possession it would enter into your soul, and though you should never see it again, you never could lose it. So it is that beautiful things, holy affections, gentle friendships-, tender joys, sweet fancies, precious hopes, radiant dreams, once ours, though only for a little while, are ours forever. The forms may vanish, but the spirit remains.

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