The World's Great Sermons, Volume 06: H. W. Beecher to Punshon
Religion
The World's Great Sermons, Volume 06: H. W. Beecher to Punshon
Sermons
Do two persons walk together in an inseparable union, mingling their
brightest and noblest thoughts, striving for the highest ideal, like
flowers that grow by the side of each other, breathing fragrance
each on the other, and shining in beauty each for the other; are
two persons thus twined together and bound together for life, until
in some dark hour one is called and the other is left; and does
the bleeding heart go down to the grave and say, "I return dust to
dust?" Was that dust, then? That trustworthiness; that fidelity;
that frankness of truth; that transparent honesty; that heroism
of love; that disinterestedness; that fitness and exquisiteness
of taste; that fervor of love; that aspiration; that power of
conviction; that piety; that great hope in God--were all these
elements in the soul of the companion that had disappeared but just
so many phenomena of matter? And have they already collapsed and
gone, like last year's flowers struck with frost, back again to the
mold? In the grief of such an hour one will not let go the hope of
resurrection.
Can a parent go back from the grave where he has laid his children
and say, "I shall never see them more?" Even as far back as the dim
twilight in which David lived, he said, "Thou shalt not come to me,
but I shall go to thee"; and is it possible for the parental heart
to stand in our day by the side of the grave, where the children
have been put out of sight, and say, "They neither shall come to me,
nor shall I go to them; they are blossoms that have fallen; they
never shall bring forth fruit"? It is unnatural. It is hideous.
Everything that is in man, every instinct that is best in human
nature repels it.
Is not the human soul, then, itself a witness of the truth of
immortality?
Men say, "You cannot prove it. There is no argument that can
establish it. No man has seen it, and it cannot be substantiated. It
is not a ponderable thing." Men demand that we should prove things
by straight lines; by the alembic; by scales; by analysis; but I
say that there is much in nature which is so high that scales and
rules and alembics cannot touch it. And is not man's soul a part of
nature--the highest part?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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