| Week-Day Religion |
Chapter 16 |
Page 4 |
Do not, the, keep the alabaster boxes of your love and tenderness sealed up until your friends are dead. Fill their lives with sweetness. Speak approving, cheering words while their ears can hear them. The thing you mean to say when they are gone say before they go. The flowers you mean to send for their coffins send to brighten and sweeten their homes before they leave them. If a sermon helps you, it will do the preacher good to tell him of it. If the editor writes an article that you like, he can write a still better one next week if you send him a not of thanks. If a book you read is helpful, do you not owe it to the author to write him a word of acknowledgment? If you know a weary or neglected one or one overwrought, would it not be such work as God’s angels love to do to seek to put a little brightness and cheer into his life, to manifest true sympathy with him, and to put into his trembling hand the cup filled with the wine of human love?
I have always said – and I am sure I am speaking for thousands of weary, plodding toilers – that if my friends have vases laid away filled with the perfumes of sympathy and affection which they intend to break over my dead body, I would be glad if they would bring them out in some of my weary hours and open the, that I may be refreshed and cheered by them while I need them. I would rather have a coffin without a flower and a funeral without a spoken eulogy than a life without the sweetness of human tenderness and cheer. If we would fulfill our mission, we must anoint our friends beforehand for their burial. Post mortem kindnesses do not cheer the burdened spirit. Tears falling on the icy brow make poor and tardy atonement for the coldness and neglect and cruel selfishness in long, struggling years. Appreciation when the heart is stilled has no inspiration for the spirit. Justice comes too late when it is only pronounced in the funeral eulogium. Flowers piled on the coffin cast not fragrance backward over the weary days.
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