IMMORTALITY.
To them who by patient continuance in well doing seek for glory and honour and immortality, eternal life.—Romans, ii. 7.
This corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.—I. Corinthians, xv. 53.
Our Saviour Jesus Christ, who hath abolished death, and hath brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.—II. Timothy, i. 10.
Immortal honour, endless fame
Attend the Almighty Father’s name.
Dryden.
Thy nature, immortality! who knows?
And yet who knows it not? It is but life
In stronger thread of brighter colour spun,
And spun for ever, dipt by cruel fate
In Stygian die, how black, how brittle here!
How short our correspondence with the sun!
And while it lasts, Inglorious! Our best deeds,
How wanting in their weight! our highest joys,
Small cordials to support us in our pain,
And give us strength to suffer. But how great
To mingle interests, converse, amities,
With all the sons of reason, scatter’d wide
Through habitable space, wherever born,
Howe’er endowed! To live free citizens
Of universal nature! To lay hold
By more than feeble faith on the Supreme!
To call heaven’s rich unfathomable mines
(Mines, which support archangels in their state,)
Our own! To rise in science as in bliss,
Initiate in the secrets of the skies!
To read creation; read its mighty plan
In the bare bosom of the Deity!
The plan, and execution, to collate!
To see, before each glance of piercing thought,
All cloud, all shadow blown remote; and leave
No mystery—but that of love divine,
Which lifts us on the Seraph’s flaming wing,
From earth’s aceldama, this field of blood,
Of inward anguish, and of outward ill,
From darkness, and from dust, to such a scene!
Love’s element! True joy’s illustrious house!
From earth’s sad contrast (now deplor’d) more fair!
What exquisite vicissitude of fate!
Blest absolution of our blackest hour!
Young.
Man’s soul immortal is; whilst here they live,
The purest minds for perfect knowledge strive;
Which is the knowledge of that glorious God,
From whom all life proceeds: in this abode
Of flesh, the soul can never reach so high,
So reason tells us. If the soul then die,
When from the body’s bonds she takes her flight,
Her unfulfilled desire is frustrate quite,
And so bestowed in vain! It follows then,
The best desires, unto the best of men,
The Great Creator did in vain dispense,
Or else the soul must live when gone from hence,
And if it live after the body fall,
What reason proves that it must die at all?
Thomas May.
Strong as the death it masters, is the hope
That onward looks to immortality:
Let the frame perish, so the soul survive,
Pure, spiritual, and loving. I believe
The grave exalts, not separates, the ties
That hold us in affection to our kind.
I will look down from yonder pitying sky,
Watching and waiting those I loved on earth;
Anxious in heaven, until they, too, are there.
I will attend your guardian angel’s side
And weep away your faults with holy tears:
Your midnight shall be filled with solemn thought;
And when, at length, death brings you to my love,
Mine the first welcome heard in Paradise.
Anon.
The sun is but a spark of fire,—
A transient meteor in the sky:
The soul, immortal as its Sire,
Shall never die!
J. Montgomery.
Prisoners of hope! heirs of eternity!
Waiting for the consummate day, when time
Shall be no more—Why on the past dwell ye?
Prisoners of hope! look to the goal sublime
Of the expanded future, and behold
The flesh redeemed to its immortal prime.
J. A. Heraud.
Yet know, vain sceptics, know the Almighty mind,
Who breathed on man a portion of His fire,
Bade his free soul, by earth nor time confined,
To Heaven, to immortality aspire.
Nor shall the pile of hope His mercy reared,
By vain philosophy be e’er destroyed:
Eternity, by all or wished or feared,
Shall be, by all, or suffered, or enjoyed.
William Mason.
Whoe’er thou art, this truth take home,—and think
Two spirits only for thy soul contend,—
The good and bad; but now alone is grace
Imparted; soon thy final sands will fall,
And thou in moral nakedness shalt be
To Devil or to Deity assign’d
Through endless ages!—Oh, that truth immense,
This mortal, immortality shall wear!
The pulse of mind can never cease to play;
By God awaken’d, it for ever throbs,
Eternal as His own eternity!
Above the angels, or below the fiends:
To mount in glory, or in shame descend—
Mankind are destined by resistless doom.
R. Montgomery.
Beyond the purple verge of infinite space,
The immortal soul of man shall live again;
Live where its glories never more may wane,
And where its nobler memories will efface
All thoughts which rend the solemn’ pall away
That shrouds the meanness of its primal clay.
H. B. Hirst.