In God’s economy must all experience misery, to dull the love of life, and kindle hope for a blissful future, to steal from the heart its cherished here, to yield it all in its hereafter.  Ah! we know what a world this is, but what a world is to come we know not.  Is it not as reasonable to believe we lived before our birth into this, as to hope we shall live after death in another world?  Is this hope the instinct of the coming, or does it grow from the baser instinct of love for the miserable life we have?  It is easy to ask, but who shall answer?  Is it the mind which remembers, and is the mind the soul? or is the soul independent of the mind, surviving the mind’s extinction? and do the memories of time die with time? or,

  Do these pursue beyond the grave? 
  Must the surviving spirit have
  Its memories of time and grief? 
  Then, surely, death is poor relief. 
  Shall it forget the all of time,
  When time’s with all her uses gone,
  And be a babe in that new clime? 
  Then death is but oblivion.

Youth’s happiness is half of hope; all that of age is memory—­and yet these memories more frequently sadden than gladden the heart.  Then what is life to age?  Garrulity, and to be in the way.  Our household gods grow weary of our worship, and the empty stool we have filled in gray and trembling age in the temple we have built, when we are gone is kicked away, and we are forgotten; our very children regret (though they sometimes assume a painful apprehension) we do not make haste to die—­if we have that they crave, and inherit when we shall have passed to eternity.  But if the gift of raiment and food is imposed by poverty on those who gave them birth, they complain, and not unfrequently turn from their door the aged, palsied parent, to die, or live on strangers’ charity.  Sad picture, but very true, very true; poor human nature!  And man, so capable in his nature of this ungodliness, boasts himself made after God’s own image.  Vanity of vanities!

Nature’s harmony, nature’s loveliness, nature’s expansive greatness and grandeur teaches of God, and godliness.  The inanimate and unthinking are consistently harmonious and beautiful; man only mars the harmony, and makes a hell for man in time.  Then, is time his all? or, shall this accursed rabidness be purged away with death, and he become a tone in accord with inanimate things? or, shall this but purify as fire the yielding metal, the inner man, which hope or instinct whispers lives, and animates its tenement of time, to view, to know, and to enjoy creation through eternity?  Wild thoughts are kindling in my brain, wild feelings stir my heart.