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The Hours Of Life
by
And now do I recognise the good that my patient, suffering old friend did me in my childhood; would that I had read the Holy Bible to her many other days. Doubtless she is now a beautiful angel in Heaven.
The angels! and Heaven! now too do I understand the inner existence; and the dreams and visions of my childhood were, after all, blessed realities; and the dead father and the dead mother, after whom my childish heart yearned so lovingly, were revealed to me as a living father and a living mother, in a wondrously beautiful life. Thus was a warm inner love kept alive in my soul; and now I know that death is but a new birth. As a glove is drawn from the hand, so is the body drawn from the spirit; and, I too, will thus be born again. Life is again crowned with a beautiful hope.
Life!–and this mystery too is solved. God is the alone life, and finite human spirits are forms receptive of life from God. God is the soul and creation is His body–and from this infinite Divine soul, life flows forth into every atom of the body. Beautiful thought! The Lord sits throned in the inmost, and is cognisant of every nerve that thrills through His boundless universe of being. Every thought and feeling that passes through my heart and mind is as clearly perceived by Him, as are the sensations of my body perceived by my soul. Thus are we in God, and God in us.
And how vast is the thought that suns, and their peopled worlds, are to the body of God but as the drops of blood to the finite human body; and who can count these drops? for as they flow forth, and back to the heart, they ever grow and change, and increase–and who can measure the Infinite! and this Being, sentient of all things in the universe, providing for all things; seeing all things; maintaining order, down to the minutest particle, in a system which the finite thought of man can never grasp–and loving his creatures in myriads of worlds, of which man never dreamed. How inconceivable must be His boundless wisdom, His infinite love! Can we wonder that a Soul so glowing with love, so radiant in intelligence, should shine as the sun? Yes–this is the Central Sun, whose spiritual beams, pouring forth their Divine influences, creating as they go angelic and spiritual intelligences, finally ultimate themselves in material suns, and material human bodies. Thus the garment of dull, opaque matter is woven by the Divine Soul, through the condensations of His emanations. Thus, were “all things made by Him; and without Him was not anything made that was made;” and “in Him was life, and the life was the light of men.”
The thought sinks after this far flight–we worship and adore the Infinite. But the Lord must for ever remain apart from our weak natures, as far as the sun is above the earth. He lives, in His incomprehensible self-existence, at an immeasurable distance from us. This the Divine Man sees, and in His tender compassion and loving mercy for every human soul He creates, a twin-soul is made, that the finite may find the fullness of delight in another finite existence.
Oh, blessed and beautiful providence of God! that two human hearts and minds may intertwine in mutual support, and look up to the Infinite. And in the glorious sunshine of life, grow ever young and beautiful, in an immortal youth.
Oh, ye suffering, sorrowing children of earth! turn your affections and hopes from the fleeting things of time; from the outside-world, to the beautiful inner spirit-life, where eternity develops ever new and varying joys. Then only can the day dawn upon the human soul, and the midnight darkness be dissipated by boundless effulgence of light.