circumstance." Human loves, remembrances, faiths, and fellowships
lift up all their meek hands to the Father of Spirits, praying to be
lifted up into His great immortality, and to be permitted to take
with them unbroken the associations that sweetened this earthly
life. Many humble souls that have passed through the furnace of
affliction, poverty, and trial seven times heated, and heated daily
here, have believed that He who went up through the same suffering
to His great White Throne, would let them sing beside the crystal
waters the same good old psalm tunes and songs of Sion which they
sang under the willows of this lower world of tears and tribulation.
How all the sparks of the undying life in man fly upward to the
zenith of this immortality! You may call the steep flights of this
faith pleasant and poetical diversions of a fervid imagination, but
they are winged with the pinions that angels lift when they soar;
pinions less ethereal than theirs, but formed and plumed to beat
upward on the Milky Way to their Source, instead of swimming in the
thinly-starred cerulean, in which spirits, never touched with the
down or dust of human attributes, descend and ascend on their
missions to the earth. Who can have the heart to handle harshly
these beautiful faiths? To say, this hope may go up, but this must
go down to the darkness of annihilation! Was it irreverent in the
pious singing-master of a New England village, when he said, that
often, while returning home late on bright winter nights, he had
dropped the reins upon his horse's neck, and sung Old Hundred from
the stars, set as notes to that holy tune, when they first sang
together in the morning of the creation? What spiritual good or
Christian end would be gained, to break up the charm and cheer of
this his belief? Or to dispel that other confidence, which so
helped him to bear earth's trials, that one day he should join all
the spirits of the just made perfect, and all the high angels in