Opens through the shades of death.[177]
This was the view of death taken by the Evangelicals in the eighteenth century. The gospel of the great Revival brought life and immortality to light, robbed death of all its terrors, and made heaven seem, even to young men, far better than earth. The nineteenth century had not the glowing rapture of the earlier time. Moreover, its interest in works of Christian philanthropy, its awakening to the great missionary call, made the life and work of the day infinitely important and interesting. Christian men began to realize that heaven lay beyond the golden glory of the sunset sky, and felt, with those of the older dispensation, that it was a calamity for the sun to go down while it was yet day. Lyte felt with Anne Brontë—
I hoped that with the brave and strong
My portioned task might lie.
Lyte’s sorrow was not that he feared to change the earthly for the heavenly, but that he longed to have done enduring work e’er the night fell.
Why do I sigh to find
Life’s evening shadows gathering round my way,
The keen eye dimming, and the buoyant mind
Unhinging day by day?
Is it the natural dread