speaks out of the heights and the depths around us, to give any answer to our own; if we are thus left to ourselves in this vast world,—­there is in this a coldness and a loneliness; and whenever we come to be, of necessity, driven to be with our own hearts alone, the coldness and the loneliness must be felt.  But consider that the things which we see around us cannot remain with us, nor we with them.  The coldness and loneliness of the world, without God, must be felt more and more as life wears on:  in every change of our own state, in every separation from or loss of a friend, in every more sensible weakness of our own bodies, in every additional experience of the uncertainty of our own counsels,—­the deathlike feeling will come upon us more and more strongly:  we shall gain more of that fearful knowledge which tells us that “God is not the God of the dead.”

And so, also, the blessed knowledge that he is the God “of the living” grows upon those who are truly alive.  Surely he “is not far from every one of us.”  No occasion of life fails to remind those who live unto him, that he is their God, and that they are his children.  On light occasions or on grave ones, in sorrow and in joy, still the warmth of his love is spread, as it were, all through the atmosphere of their lives:  they for ever feel his blessing.  And if it fills them with joy unspeakable even now, when they so often feel how little they deserve it; if they delight still in being with God, and in living to him, let them be sure that they have in themselves the unerring witness of life eternal:—­God is the God of the living, and all who are with him must live.

Hard it is, I well know, to bring this home, in any degree, to the minds of those who are dead:  for it is of the very nature of the dead that they can hear no words of life.  But it has happened that, even whilst writing what I have just been uttering to you, the news reached me that one, who two months ago was one of your number, who this very half-year has shared in all the business and amusements of this place, is passed already into that state where the meanings of the terms life and death are become fully revealed.  He knows what it is to live unto God and what it is to die to him.  Those things which are to us unfathomable mysteries, are to him all plain:  and yet but two months ago he might have thought himself as far from attaining this knowledge as any of us can do.  Wherefore it is clear, that these things, life and death, may hurry their lesson upon us sooner than we deem of, sooner than we are prepared to receive it.  And that were indeed awful, if, being dead to God, and yet little feeling it, because of the enjoyments of our worldly life these enjoyments were of a sudden to be struck away from us, and we should find then that to be dead to God is death indeed, a death from which there is no waking and in which there is no sleeping forever.

CHESTER ALAN ARTHUR (1830-1886)