“So close heaven lies that when my sight is clear,
I think I see the gleaming strand;
I know I feel that those who’ve gone from here
Come near enough to touch my hand.
I often think but for our veiled eyes,
We should find that heaven right ‘round about us lies.”
Death is ever bearing away the fresh and fair and beautiful ones of earth, and leaving hearts bleeding, and homes desolate. Apart from the religion of Christ, there is not light in the darkness of bereavement. The best that philosophy can do is to try to forget the grief. Science can do nothing better. But the word of God lights the lamps of true consolation in the gloom of Christian sorrow.
In Christ we never really lose our friends who pass away from us in the vanishing of death. They go from our sight, but they are ours still. They were never so lovely in life, when they walked before us, as they are now, when only love’s eyes can see them. They live in our memory, in our very soul; and it is in transfigured beauty that they dwell with us. We do not think any more of the faults and blemishes which we used to see in them so clearly when they were with us; death’s hand has swept all these away. At the same time every lovely feature in them shines out not like a star at night, and all the good things they ever did are remembered, and appear radiant as angel ministries. Such strange power has love under the quickening touch of deaths’ hand.
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