own work good, will He one day suddenly change, and pronounce it evil? He who dowered this earth with such strong and sweet attachments, will He denude heaven of these? It would have been easy to have placed us from the first in an atmosphere of insipid and uniform affection, felt by and for all alike; in an ocean without islands and without shore. But this is not the Divine idea; it is the vain imagination of man. If this earth, deprived of special and particular affections, seems to crumble away beneath our feet; if it presents us with nothing better than isolated creatures, wandering about, each in his own dim personality, equally attracting, equally repelling all the rest; if the result be a chaotic vortex, cold, indefinite, sad, and unspeakably tiresome, what would a heaven be on the same plan? There are families on high, united in indissoluble ties, loving each other with a firmer, stronger love than earth ever knew. No egotism diminishes, no infidelity sullies, no ambition chokes, no love of gold petrifies it; it is constantly rebaptized in the adoration of God, and this adoration, far from extinguishing it, only imparts its own eternal glory.'* Yes, surely death leads us back into the dear, blessed past, when in its opening of the gates into the life beyond. it gives us again the faces and the hearts of all our loved ones, and so the past shall live again in the future. And we may not only reason upon such sure premises as these. In the light of certain hints, given in Holy Scripture, and which may be even held as more conclusive because implied rather than distinctly stated, we may, although we would not indulge any too curious speculation, yet surely and confidently believe that it is lawful to image each newly-disembodied soul thus greeted with a welcome of * Countess de Gasparin, 'The Near and the Heavenly Horizons,' pp. 267-269. home. For how gentle are our Lord's own words in that strange parable:* 'That when ye fail, they [the friends Christian love and charity have made] may receivet you into everlasting habitations.' 'Make now to thyself' (these are the words of St. Thomas à Kempis) 'friends of the regenerate and glorified sons of God, that when thy present life shall fail they may receive thee into everlasting habitations.' 'Other angels,' says Anselm of the departing soul, 'fly to greet her, and other saints, whose post is there before the face of the Majesty of God, and who, recognising her as their friend and companion in good works, joyfully embrace her with the arms of tender love, and salute her in such words as declare the universal joy of one and all of the dwellers in blessedness: "Lo, thou art our companion; lo, thou art our friend, for thou hast served God faithfully; now, now at last rest thee from thy toil, and enjoy unending beatitude now and onwards through eternity." There shall not then be given the misery of a half-chilling welcome to the souls who enter there, chilled through so lately, as they were, with the cold, misty night of death. This, indeed, may be rather our sadness, that while love—vehement, ardent, constant love-is the dowry of Paradise, and the souls of our dead, as they gather into the quiet land of contemplation and peace, have loving welcome, and possess, *Cf. Turretin, 'Inst. Theol.,' iii., Locus xx., Quæst. II, though he employs the verse in relation to the final life (not recognising an intermediate state), and of the beatifica cognitio. Surely the theological difficulties found in this single word are easily disposed of by giving it the perfectly general sense of welcome! Cf. Trench, 'On the Parables,' p. 445. Cf. also Methodius, 'On the Resurrection,' c. 5. 'De Imitatione,' i., p. 23. There is an interesting protest in this medieval writer against the dogma of purgatory in the same meditation. 'Who will remember thee after death, and who will then pray for thee, and whose prayer can then avail thee ?' unextinguished and unlowered, only clarified into a purer. flame, the fires of their former affections, which burn more high and clear within them, our hearts, linking themselves afresh in the crowded path of life with new loves, and in some necessary measure passing onward from the turn in the road where we bade farewell with clasped hands to them, and so they turned and went from us to God,— should lose it is an agony barely to imagine it!-any of the warmth of our devotion to them and to their memory. This has been pathetically expressed: 'Alas! many amongst us never raise their thoughts to the skies. Heaven would be strange to them; they rest on the earth, where they soon reconcile themselves. For one instant the traveller stops, looks about him, thinking on which side his companion has disappeared, then prepares himself for solitude, shoulders his pack again, and makes the best of it. 'After all, there is very little need to teach men egotism; they have most of them taken their degree in that philosophy. 'To gather myself together, and to fall in the softest place, when a fall is inevitable; to throw the cargo into the sea, if the winds are tempestuous, and to steer close to the land; we are all more or less capable of this. 'Oh, you who, after ten, after twenty years of absence, weep with hope, and hope in weeping, I respect you from the bottom of my soul. You are the true lovers; you are the truly happy. 'One thing seems horrible to me in my sorrow-to think that it may have an end; that some commonplace wellbeing may displace it; that we may learn to dispense with what was once our life; that a little vulgar existence, with its repasts at stated hours, and its customary trivial pleasures, shall fill the void in the heart made by the loss of the dearest friend, so that if he returned we should not know where to place him. There is something in this which. might well draw from Ecclesiastes one of those cries he uttered when proclaiming the vanity of human life : ""Life is short-swift as a sunbeam. Let us rejoice! The wind has swept away our tent; let us build again on the shifting sand!" 'Do not think I am an idolater of grief; I am not. Only I will not make a god of "happiness at any price." I know well that we must live upon the earth, and finish our career; but I choose to walk with the image of my absent friend— always we are two.'* Oh! it is sweet to think that in the quiet sunshine of that unknown Life, earthly love in God is not withered like a dew-less flower, nor is it slowly dying, scorched to the roots by the fierce sunshine of a greater and a rival glory. No; it must be only matured, ripened, hallowed, and refined by the Vision of the Love, from which it came into our hearts, and by the pure and holy dews of the Spirit of grace, who first planted it there as a holy gift from Himself. If, then, we may believe that those to whom we have so poorly ministered, with whom we have shared the miserable mammon of unrighteousness,'† and whose necessities we have relieved with our worldly wealth;—if they are waiting thus to give us welcome, oh, how much infinitely rather shall we receive it from those, our nearest and best-beloved, who have gone before us into the home-land, and for whom we have been feverishly longing, perhaps for many years! That in the last resurrection (and surely, therefore, in the intermediate state) the natural loves of earth, hallowed *The Near and the Heavenly Horizons,' p. 190. + A very strange and wholly inadmissible interpretation of the words 'shall fail' will be found in Irenæus, Adv. Hær.,' iv. 3. 6 as the gift and dower of God, and sanctified in Him, will be perpetuated by His will, and made for ever one chief part of our beatitude, is sweetly prefigured and foretold in the story written by the Evangelist of the young man raised by Christ at Nain, for 'Jesus delivered him to his mother.' The Blessed One, who had rescued and snatched its victim from that grave, which the feet of the bearers had almost reached, seems to prefer even to His own supreme claims the mother's rights and her longing to embrace her son. See, He will stand aside, exacting no adoration nor grateful homage until the hunger of the mother's heart is all satisfied by the warm touch of the lips that have been so white and cold in death, and that are now pressed upon her cheek with the warmth of life again. With so exquisite a deference of the Divine love, shown once to poor earthly love, can we doubt that, even this very moment perhaps, the bright eyes of our dead, who live in God, are looking forward to meet our eyes; that their feet are allowed to hasten to the gate where we shall one day enter, who are still standing on the weary shores of time, and can only strain our sight to catch some distant glow from the dear and beatific land that lies far beyond the surges of death, those sad surges which are always breaking with so hollow a moan upon the sands of this life? Yes, perhaps there is a crowd of faces within that gate, the shadow of which only slants and falls towards this land and region of death. From its high parapets many perhaps are now leaning eagerly 'At morn and eve, to catch some distant sound Of our home-coming feet. And when at length The evening-time of our long day shall come ;— An everlasting entrance, there their love |