We shall bear in mind that we, too, are to have survivors, to whom it will be the greatest favor if we leave a good assurance, based upon their remembrance of our piety, that we are happy, thus constraining them to follow us to heaven.  We shall do well if we habitually say, as Elijah said to Elisha, “The Lord hath sent me to Jordan;” and that we are one day to be taken up and conveyed to that same heaven whither Elijah went, and from which he came to meet Christ, and to speak with him of his decease, which he should accomplish at Jerusalem.  What if we knew that some day, not far distant, flaming chariots and horses, over our dwelling, would wait to bring us home to God?  The ministering spirits are already designated who are to perform this office for those who are heirs of salvation.  What, then, are we searching for among the dark, gloomy valleys of sorrow, or on the hills of earthly vision?  If our friends are with Christ, we must be prepared to be with him, or lose their society; and that loss will be worse than the first.

Sometimes we feel as though we were sailing away from our departed friends, leaving them behind us.  Not so; we are sailing towards them; they went forward, and we are nearer to them now than yesterday; and the night is far spent; the day is at hand.  If life, or any undue portion, be spent in grief which unfits us for duty, we shall see, in heaven, how much better it would have been had we had more faith, and had lived more as then we should desire our surviving friends to live, quickened and strengthened by the assured hope of our being in heaven, and by the expectation of meeting us there.

But there is one kind of sorrow and desire for departed friends which, in its consequences, is greatly to be deplored.  Some refuse to become decided Christians, because their friends, they think, were not believers in the faith which these surviving friends are now persuaded is the truth.  To embrace this truth, as essential to salvation, it is felt, will be to condemn these departed friends; and some have, in so many words, declared that they preferred to share the fate of their companions, or children, who gave no evidence of having accepted the gospel, as it is now viewed by these survivors.

How sad would be such a catastrophe as this:  The departed friend, in the secret exercises of his mind, and by the good Spirit of God, may have been, at the last hour, prevailed upon to accept the offers of salvation by a crucified Redeemer.  He gave no intimation of this, owing, perhaps, to bodily weakness, or to fear and distrust; but, through infinite mercy, he was saved by faith in the Lamb of God.  The surviving friend, persuaded of the truth, refuses to comply with it, and loves the departed friend more than Christ, or truth and duty; and then, dying, finds that the departed friend is saved, through that very faith, which the other refused from idolatrous attachment to the departed; and now they are separated; whereas, had the survivor forsaken all for Christ and the truth, he would have had a hundred fold in this world, and, in the world to come, would have found that friend whom he would, as it were, have forsaken for Christ’s sake and the gospel’s.  It is safe, it is best, for each of us to do his duty, to walk by the light afforded us, and not to make a creature our standard, nor our chief good.