Does love pass away (with death)? I cannot believe it. God made us as we are, many instead of one. Christ died for all of us individually, and such as we are—beings incomplete in themselves, and perfect only through love to God on one side, and through love to man on the other. We want both kinds of love for our very existence, and therefore in a higher and better existence too the love of kindred souls may well exist together with our love of God. We need not love those we love best on earth less in heaven, though we may love all better than we do on earth. After all, love seems only the taking away those unnatural barriers which divide us from our fellow creatures—it is only the restoration of that union which binds us altogether in God, and which has broken on earth we know not how. In Christ alone that union was preserved, for He loved us all with a love warmer than the love of a husband for his wife, or a mother for her child. He gave His life for us, and if we ask ourselves there is hardly a husband or a mother who would really suffer death for his wife or her child. Thus we see that even what seems to us the most perfect love is very far as yet from the perfection of love which drives out the whole self and all that is selfish, and we must try to love more, not to love less, and trust that what is imperfect here is not meant to be destroyed, but to be made perfect hereafter. With God nothing is imperfect; without Him everything is imperfect. We must live and love in God, and then we need not fear: though our life seem chequered and fleeting, we know that there is a home for us in God, and rest for all our troubles in Christ.
Life.
Let us hold together while life lasts. Hand in hand we may achieve more than each alone by himself. We are much less afraid when we are two together. The chief condition of all spiritual friendship is perfect frankness. There is no better proof of true friendship than sincere reproof, where such reproof is necessary. We are occupied in one great work, and in this consciousness all that is small must necessarily disappear.
Life.
Why do we love so deeply? Is not that also God's will? And if so, why should that love ever cease? What should we be without it? I cannot believe that we are to surrender that love, that we are to lose those who were given us to love. Love may be purified, may become more and more unselfish, may be very different from what it was on earth, but sympathy, suffering together and rejoicing together, lies very deep at the root of all being—were it ever to cease, our very being might cease too. We cannot help loving, loving more and more, better and better. Thus life becomes brighter and brighter again, and we feel that we have not lost those who are taken from us for a little while. We love them all the more, all the better.
MS.
How selfish we are even in our love. Here we live for a short season, and we know we must part sooner or later. We wish to go first, and to leave those whom we love behind us, and we sorrow because they went first and left us behind. As soon as one looks beyond this life, it seems so short, yet there was a time when it seemed endless.
MS.
The past is ours, and there we have all who loved us, and whom we love as much as ever, ay, more than ever.
MS.