We must not forget in our personal griefs and longings, in our sorrows for those whom we have lost and our desire to find them again, in our sense of our own mortal frailty and the brief duration of earthly life, the celestial impulse which demands a life triumphant over death.

The strongest of all supports for peace on earth is the faith in immortality.  The truth is, the very character of our being here in this world demands continuance beyond death.  There is nothing good or great that we think or feel or endeavour, that is not a reaching out to something better.  Our finest knowledge is but the consciousness of limitation and the longing that it may be removed.  Our best moral effort is but a slow advance towards something better.  Our sense of the difference between good and evil, our penitence, our aspiration, all this moral freight with which our souls are laden, is a cargo consigned to an unseen country.  Our bill of lading reads, “To the immortal life.”  If we must sink in mid-ocean, then all is lost, and the voyage of life is a predestined wreck.

The wisest, the strongest, the best of mankind, have felt this most deeply.  The faith in immortality belongs to the childhood of the race, and the greatest of the sages have always returned to it and taken refuge in it.  Socrates and Plato, Cicero and Plutarch, Montesquieu and Franklin, Kant and Emerson, Tennyson and Browning,—­how do they all bear witness to the incompleteness of life and reach out to a completion beyond the grave.

    “No great Thinker ever lived and taught you
    All the wonder that his soul received;
    No great Painter ever set on canvas
    All the glorious vision he conceived.

    “No Musician ever held your spirit
    Charmed and bound in his melodious chains;
    But, be sure, he heard, and strove to render,
    Feeble echoes of celestial strains.

    “No real Poet ever wove in numbers
    All his dream, but the diviner part,
    Hidden from all the world, spake to him only
    In the voiceless silence of his heart.

    “So with Love:  for Love and Art united
    Are twin mysteries:  different yet the same;
    Poor indeed would be the love of any
    Who could find its full and perfect name.

    “Love may strive; but vain is its endeavour
    All its boundless riches to unfold;
    Still its tenderest, truest secret lingers
    Ever in its deepest depths untold.

    “Things of Time have voices:  speak and perish. 
    Art and Love speak; but their words must be
    Like sighings of illimitable forests
    And waves of an unfathomable sea.”

And can it be that death shall put the final seal of irretrievable ruin on all this uncompleted effort?  Can it be that the grave shall whelm all this unuttered love in endless silence?  Ah, what a wild waste of precious treasure, what a mad destruction of fair designs, what an utter failure, life would be if death must end all!