No one can ponder the great theme of immortality for an hour and not feel the stir and glow of a better, nobler life in him. In our more prosaic moods we are like men shut up in a narrow cell. We see for the time nothing but the little patch of dusty floor at our feet and the cold, cheerless walls that encircle us. We are occupied with our little round of duties. Burdens press, sorrows pour bitter tears into our cup, our hopes are shattered; or we have our short lived joys, we see our plans succeed, and play at living like children in their mimic fancies. Now and then we have intimations of a wider and more glorious world outside our walls, stretching away beyond the small circle in which we dwell. Faint voices appear to come to us from without. Or there are glimmerings as if of memory, like the visionary gleams of a past and forgotten life, which flash before us in our higher moods. In these rare moments we seem to realize the meaning of the poet’s sublime thought:
“Our birth is but a sleep and forgetting;
The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory,
do we come From God, who is our home.”
But to most of us pent up in this earthly life these are only merest intimations, faintest whispers, dreamlike suggestions. We go on living in our narrow sphere, oppressed by its limitations, our faculties and powers stunted by its gloom.
Did you ever climb the winding staircase in the interior of some great monument or tower? At intervals, as you ascended, you came to a window which let in a little light, and through which, as you looked out, you had a glimpse of a great expanse of fair and lovely world outside the dark tower. You saw green fields, rich gardens, picturesque landscapes, streams flashing like flowing silver in the sunshine, the blue sea yonder, and far away, on the other hand the shadowy forms of great mountains. How little, how dark, how poor and cheerless, seemed the close, narrow limits of your staircase as you looked out upon the illimitable view that stretched from your window!
Life in this world is like the ascent of such a column. But while we climb heavily and wearily up its steep, dark stairway, there lies, outside the thick walls, a glorious world reaching away into eternity, beautiful and filled with the rarest things of God’s love. And thoughts of immortality, when they come to us, are little windows through which we have glimpses of the infinite sweep and stretch of life beyond this hampered, broken, fragmentary existence of earth.
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