The most poignant sorrow is that which cannot be communicated to others or shared by others, because the tie severed by bereavement, like that of husband and wife, is between two only. The loss by death of a beloved life companion is apt to lead to an inconsolable state of mind, because in this relation, when finely interpreted, the empirical and the spiritual appear almost to coincide. The ethical rule, Live in the life of another, live so as to enhance to the highest degree the possibilities of another, seems almost no longer a counsel of perfection but an actual experience. Hence the utter grief into which the sundering of the tie is apt to plunge the survivor. On the other hand, Jonathan Edwards said on his deathbed to his wife: “Our relation has been spiritual, and therefore is eternal.” And there is indeed an element of eternality in marriage, only it is not the sex relation as such that is or can be conceived of as eternal. It is not man and woman in their empirical form to which this attribute belongs. Marriage is the sign; the spiritual relation that which is signified.[48] It may be objected that marriage being a tie strictly between two, one can hardly think without repugnance of an equally intimate, nay, far more intimate, relation with all spiritual beings whatsoever. Yet the spiritual relation is one in which the ethical being is conceived to be in touch with each of the infinite beings that comprise the spiritual universe, pouring its essential life into them, and receiving theirs in return. Is not then the sign incompatible with and contradictory to the thing signified? But it is not of the multitude of mortal men and women surrounding us that we think when we speak of the eternal hosts. From this surrounding swarm of mortals, we retreat, taking refuge in the inmost privacy which we share with one other only. Yet this very inmost intimacy, so far as it is pure, is the emblem of that pure intercourse of essential being with essential being in which we are related to all.[49] Following up the subject of bereavement, we find the following consolations employed: