tation. In the spiritual realm, I am still a stranger in many of its provinces, 

 though I hope to be more than a sojourner ; but when I enter into commun- 

 ion with him, I feel that I have joined myself to a citizen of that country, 

 who has explored the whole of it, and on whose accounts of it I can place 

 full reliance. Now, he always speaks of immortality as if it were with him 

 a matter, not of doubt or conjecture, not of mere hope, but of certainty. 



Nor does it seem to me of small interest for us, that in general it has been 

 the strong and good who have had this assurance ; while, of those who have 

 denied human immortality as a baseless vision of fanaticism, no mean pro- 

 portion have been men who not unfitly might have felt that they had souls 

 not worth preserving. Not that I would cast reproach on honest scepticism, 

 least of all on that not infrequent type which dares not believe so great a 

 blessedness ; but it certainly has seldom been among spiritually minded men, 

 or among those of pure and high morality, that is, among the kind of men 

 that have been the most at home in the spiritual world, that human immor- 

 tality has reckoned its foremost deniers. 



But not only do I congratulate myself on the testimony of great and good 

 men in harmony with that of Jesus Christ, it is when I think of such men 

 that real death seems utterly opposed to nature, and in itself incredible. Had 

 not Jesus re-appeared, think you that John and Martha and Mary could have 

 believed him wholly dead ? Had the great stone never been rolled away from 

 the sepulchre, would not the saintly women who went thither have felt that 

 the life so divinely pure, so radiantly beautiful, had sunk from their sight, 

 only to rise in some other chamber of that Father's house of which he had 

 been talking so familiarly only three nights before ? 



But without dwelling on him, the All Perfect, have we not a like feeling 

 with reference to all persons of advanced wisdom and worth ? In our own 

 thought we cannot make them dead. They will not stay dead. Press down 

 as you will the earth-clods over what bore their names, you cannot feel that 

 they are buried there, that all that there was of them is mouldering and 

 crumbling away under the ground. 



We talk of a finished life, a life beautifully rounded off, one that has 

 reached its natural period, and is harvested in its late autumn like a shock of 

 corn in its season. There are no such lives ; or, if there be any, they are the 

 kind of lives of which such things are never said. The only finished lives 

 are those that are never fairly begun. The only symmetrically rounded lives 

 are those that have described very small circles. The saint, the sage, the 

 genius, though he live to fourscore, feels that his life has been only a begin- 



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