"That is a very touching incident," said my friend, when I had related this conversation to her. "If all earth-dwellers were as spiritually-minded as yonder poet's poet-father, and were as capable of apprehending how real a thing spiritual companionship may be, our dead would soon cease to be called our 'lost ones,' and death would no longer be spoken of as the 'great parting.' Death gives us more friends than he takes from us, and often brings us nearer to those who have gone before, than we were during their lifetime. Though it is nineteen hundred years since our Master, Christ, trod the earth a visible Presence, yet He is more to the world to-day, and nearer to each separate soul in it, than ever He was to the men and women who touched garments with Him when He walked the fields of Palestine. Then such as sought His aid had often to wait His coming in weariness and weakness of soul, whilst not seldom it happened that they could not obtain access to him 'because of the throng,' and we read even of one who was fain to climb a tree to catch a glimpse of Him in passing. Now He stands by each of us, waiting and willing to hear. Then they had to go to Him; now He comes to us, and is with us always and in every place. I tell you that Jesus Christ is as real a Presence to-day in the streets of London or Boston, as He was in the homes of Nazareth or Jerusalem. He is as near to us now as He was to Martha and to Mary, and is as willing to help and hear you or me, as He was to heal the sick, or to pardon the dying thief;" and then in a low, sweet voice she repeated the following lines from Whittier's poem, "Our Master":—
"But warm, sweet, tender, even yet
A present help is He;
And faith has still its Olivet,
And love its Galilee.
"The healing of His seamless dress
Is by our beds of pain;
We touch Him in life's throng and press,
And we are whole again.
"Through Him the first fond prayers are said,
Our lips of childhood frame,
The last low whispers of our dead
Are burdened with His name."
"The thought that the 'last low whispers' of the loved ones who have left us were 'burdened' with the Name which we first learned to lisp at our mother's knee is a very tender and beautiful one," she said reverently, after a moment's silence. "We seem to see our own fathers and mothers, and their fathers and mothers, linked to ourselves, and through us to our children and our children's children, until all the generations of the world—past, present, and future—become as one family in a great bond of fellowship, even as all the joy and sorrow of humanity find one common home in the heart of the Lord Christ who loves us."
"I am not sure that I realize this love of His of which you speak," I said sadly. "It is so vague and vast that I become lost, and feel that I have no personal hold upon it. How can He love the whole world, and yet love each separate individual in it with an affection as distinct as that which I feel for my wife and children?"
"You cannot realize it as existing in yourself," she made answer, "although even you love all your children, and yet love each one of them with a distinct and personal love; but then you cannot order the succession of the seasons, or stay a planet upon its course, and you might just as well try to measure God's power by your power, as try to apprehend the love which passeth understanding by likening it to your own. But you will know what Christ is to us one day."
"Tell me more of Him," I whispered eagerly; "tell me more of Him. Did you love Him as earnestly and believe in Him as trustfully when you were on earth as you do now?"
"Not always," she answered sadly, "not always (and, oh! it was such 'cold comfort'—the talk of the Pantheists and the Deists to whom I had gone), but I came at last to see that the Cross of Christ is humanity's only hope. I came, too, to think that I could better bear to disbelieve in a God at all than to disbelieve in the Saviour. 'By Atheism,' I said to myself, 'I lose only a Deity of whom (excepting for the gospel-revelation) I know practically nothing, but in losing Christ I lose all—this world's hope as well as the next's.' There is not a creed which has been offered us during the last eighteen hundred years as a substitute for faith in the Saviour which does not take the very basis of its being from Christianity."
"Yes," I said; "but many people will tell you that Christianity is nothing more than a skilfully-framed fable, cunningly devised to adapt itself to our human needs."
"Christ was, and Christianity was before humanity or its needs came into being," she made answer; "and the sacrifice of the Cross was no afterthought given as a concession to our human requirements. On the contrary, our human requirements were given us that we, through them, might come by way of Calvary to the feet of Christ; and it is because it has been God's purpose from all eternity to save the sinner by the sacrifice of Himself that you and I feel our need of a Saviour."