Robert Hardy's Seven Days: A Dream and Its ConsequencesSheldon, Charles M.
Religion
Robert Hardy's Seven Days: A Dream and Its Consequences
Sheldon, Charles M.
Christian fiction
"I know whereof I speak, for I have walked through the world like that
myself. But death cannot be compared for one moment with life for
majesty, for solemnity, for meaning, for power. There were
seventy-five persons killed in the accident. But in the papers this
morning I read in the column next to that in which the accident was
paraded, in small type and in the briefest of paragraphs, the statement
that a certain young man in this very town of ours had been arrested
for forging his father's name on a cheque, and was a fugitive from the
law. Every day in this town and in every town all over the world
events like that, and worse than that, occur. Nay, in this very town
of ours more than seventy-five souls are, at this very moment, going
down into a far blacker hell of destruction than the one under that
fated bridge, and the community is not horrified over it. How many
mass meetings have been held in this town within the last twenty-five
years over the losses of character, the death of purity, the
destruction of honesty? Yet they have outnumbered the victims of this
late physical disaster a thousandfold. And what does mere death do?
It releases the spirit from its house of earth. Aside from that,
death does nothing to the person. But what does life do? Life does
everything. It prepares for heaven or for hell. It starts impulses,
moulds character, fixes character. Death has no kingdom without end.
Death is only the last enemy of the many enemies that life knows.
Death is a second; life is an eternity. O men, brothers, if, as I
solemnly and truly believe, this is the last opportunity I shall have
to speak to you in such large numbers, I desire you to remember, when I
have vanished from your sight, that I spent nearly my last breath in an
appeal to you to make the most of daily life, to glorify God and save
men!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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