The Hope of Immortality

THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY.

PROF. DAVID SWING.

       Such worshipers of the new are all made by the creative genius of our era, that in order to appreciate the old you must ask your imagination to picture them as coming up before you for the first time. With what tears of joy would you hail the hope of immortality had that hope just come into the world! If dust had been the assumed end of man, what discovery of science or art would compare in sublimity with the sudden assurance of a second and blessed life? Such an expectation dwarfs all the common hopes of this world. A Prince yearly approaching a throne, a gifted mind gathering up the honors of learning or power, a citizen drawing near a fabulous fortune, are all small scenes or outlooks compared with that of a humble child steadily moving toward an endless and painless being. When you remember how you all love life and feel sad over the fact that the grave is before you, you may well be amazed at the height and depth of the doctrine of a second existence that shall be in all ways higher and sweeter than this. The slowness with which this notion came to man has hidden its vastness. Its age is a witness for its truth, but is against its grandeur as a thought. It is modified by its antiquity as mountains are made treeless and cold by intervening miles. Their verdure, and cascades, and song of birds are all toned away from the senses by their distance. They are spoken of as "gray," or "hazy," or " blue." One simple attribute thus remains out of a marvelous richness and variety. From many old doctrines has the multitude moved away until ideas are seen in some one dead color - ideas vast as God and beautiful as Paradise.

       When love once fears that it may cease, it has already ceased. It is all the same to our hearts, whether the beloved one fades away or only his love.