| Week-Day Religion |
Chapter 6 |
Page 3 |
Indeed, it may be that those who have failed here, as men phrase it, are the very ones who shall win the highest success in the afterlife if they have kept their garment clean amid the struggles and toils. It has been said that heaven is probably a place for those who have failed on earth – for the
“Delicate spirits pushed away
In the hot press of the noonday.”
Certainly, for the Christian, the realization of the truth of immortality takes away the bitterness of earthly defeat. There will be time enough for victory and for the most glorious success in the unending eternity.
There are lives that are cut off here before any of their powers are developed. A thousand hopes cluster about them. Dreams of greatness or of beauty fill the visions of loving friends. Then suddenly they are stricken down in the dim dawn or the early morning. The bud had not time to open out its beauties in the short summer of earthly existence. It is borne away still folding up in its close shut calyxes all its germs and possibilities of power, loveliness and life. Sorrow weeps bitterly over the hopes that seem blighted and cuts its symbols of incompleteness upon the marble; and yet, with the warmth of immortality pressing up against the gates, what matters it that the bud did not open here and unfold its beauties this side the grave? There will be time enough in heaven’s long summer for every life to put out all its loveliness and glory. No hopes are blighted that are only carried forward into the immortal years. No life is incomplete because it is cut off too soon to ripen, in an earthly home, into majesty of form and glory of fruitage; for death does not come to the Christian as a destroyer. It dims no splendor. It blots out no beauty. It paralyzes no power. It blights no bud or germ. It only takes out of life whatever is dull, earthly and opaque, whatever is corrupt and mortal, and leaves it pure, brilliant, glorious.
“Heaven’s light for ever shines, earth’s shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many colored glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity,
Until death tramples it to fragments.”
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