idea of him; the man God had in view when he began to send him forth out
of thought into thinking; the man he is now working to perfect by
casting out what is not he, and developing what is he. But in God's real
men, that is, his ideal men, the diversity is infinite; he does not
repeat his creations; every one of his children differs from every
other, and in every one the diversity is lovable. God gives in his
children an analysis of himself, an analysis that will never be
exhausted. It is the original God-idea of the individual man that will
at length be given, without spot or blemish, into the arms of love.

Such, surely, is the heart of the comfort the Lord will give those whose
love is now making them mourn; and their present blessedness must be the
expectation of the time when the true lover shall find the restored the
same as the lost--with precious differences: the things that were not
like the true self, gone or going; the things that were loveliest,
lovelier still; the restored not merely more than the lost, but more the
person lost than he or she that was lost. For the things which made him
or her what he or she was, the things that rendered lovable, the things
essential to the person, will be more present, because more developed.

Whether or not the Lord was here thinking specially of the mourners for
the dead, as I think he was, he surely does not limit the word of
comfort to them, or wish us to believe less than that his father has
perfect comfort for every human grief. Out upon such miserable
theologians as, instead of receiving them into the good soil of a
generous heart, to bring forth truth an hundred fold, so cut and pare
the words of the Lord as to take the very life from them, quenching all
their glory and colour in their own inability to believe, and still
would have the dead letter of them accepted as the comfort of a creator
to the sore hearts he made in his own image! Here, 'as if they were