We shall surely make him real to our thoughts, if not to our senses, where he lies buried.  But we may as well stand upon the sea shore, where we had the last look of a sea-faring friend, and think that those waters, and those sands, and that horizon, will restore him.  They only serve to open farther the path of his departure; they lead our thoughts away to dwell upon him where we imagine him to be.  Nowhere does heaven seem more real than at the grave of a friend; for we know that he has not perished, and as we stand on that verge of all our fruitless search and expectation, we are compelled to fix him somewhere in our thoughts; but as he is nowhere behind us, we look onward and upward.

Our desire for departed friends, however natural and innocent, if it resulted as we sometimes would have it, would prove to be unwise.

Suppose that those “fifty strong men” had found Elijah, or in any way could have prevented his translation to heaven.  With exultation, they would have led him back across the Jordan to the company of their friends, amidst the thanksgivings of the people.  But, alas! for the prophet himself, this would have been his loss, even had it proved to be their gain.  The opening Jordan, cleft in twain by his rapt spirit, pressing its way to the skies, had returned to its course; and now the fords of the river, with its rocky bed, would have required his laboring feet to grope their way back to his toil; or the arms of men, instead of the chariots of fire and horses of fire, would have borne him again to the dull realities of life; and there, rebuking Ahab, and fleeing from Jezebel, punishing the prophets of Baal, and upbraiding the people of God in their idolatries, fasting and faint under junipers, or covering his face with his mantle at the still small voice of the Lord his God, he would again have prayed, “O Lord God, take away my life, for I am no better than my fathers.”  ’Let me not wait longer for my promised translation; let me die as my fathers did; for wherein am I better than they?’ So weary had he grown of life.  Blind and weak do these fifty strong men seem to us, in searching for this ascended prophet, this traveller over the King’s road in royal state, one of the only two who might not taste of death; the companion, in heaven, of Enoch, with a body which fills all the ransomed spirits there with joyful expectation, because it is a pledge and earnest of “the adoption, to wit, the redemption of their bodies.”  If, amid the new wonders and raptures of the heavenly world, he had had one moment to look down upon those “fifty strong men,” as they searched for him, he might well have used, in cheerful irony, something like his old upbraidings of the priests near Baal’s altar:  “Search deeper, ye ‘strong men,’ in the thickets and caves; peradventure I sleep in the brakes, and must be awaked; call, with your fifty voices together, that I may be startled from my trance; will ye give over till ye bring me back to Jericho?  Will ye search but three days?  Shall I lose the remnant of my life on earth?”