At any rate does not Scripture suggest to us in the story of Lazarus—of Moses and Elias at the Transfiguration—of the dying thief—of the spirits in the Unseen Life whom Christ visited at His death—that Death comes not as an executioner to cut off our departed one from life and love, but rather as God's good angel bringing him more than life has ever brought, and leading him by a path as full of miracles of soft arrangement as was his birth to heights of ever advancing existence.
God reveals to us too that the closing of the eyes in the darkness of Death is but the opening them to the light of a larger life, to the vision of the new mysterious real world which the glare of this world obscured. It is just what happens every day when the glare of the sunlight, revealing to us every little flower and leaf and insect, shuts out from us the great universe of God which stands forth in the midnight sky. Do you know Blanco White's famous sonnet? He is imagining what Adam must have felt as the first night fell on the earth. All the beautiful world that he had known for but a day was vanishing from him into darkness. Was the end of all things come already? But lo, a stupendous unexpected miracle! Lo, as the darkness deepened a new and more wonderful world was revealed in the sky, a world which the sunlight had kept absolutely concealed:
Hesperus, with the host of heaven came
And lo! Creation widened on man's view
Who could have thought such marvels lay concealed
Behind thy beams, O Sun? Or who could find
Whilst flower and leaf and insect stood revealed
That to such countless orbs thou madest us blind?
Why do we then shun Death with anxious strife
If Light can thus deceive, wherefore not Life?
Yes, life shuts out greater things than light does. God teaches us that Death is birth, that what the earth life conceals Death will reveal; that as the babe's eyes opened from the darkness of the womb to sunlight on this earth, so will the eyes that close in the darkness of death open on "a light that never was on sea or land."
§ 2
And may not this act of dying be much less lonely than we think? God sent each of us into this first stage of existence with mother and home and loved friends about us. No one comes into this world to loneliness. Should not that stir some hope at least that the Father may take similar care for us in our entry on the second stage at death? I hate sentimentalizing about it. But this is not sentimentalizing. I have already called attention to our Lord's only account of a good man's entrance into the Unseen. "He was carried by the angels," He said, and I have shown you some reason to think that He meant literally what He said—that the angels who are presented in Scripture as so interested in our life here are equally interested in our transition to a larger life—that loving watchers are around a soul as it passes into the Unseen.
I sometimes wonder, too, how much significance should be attached to the fairly frequent phenomenon of dying people seeming in some rapt vision to see or feel as if meeting them the presence of loved ones gone before. Sometimes these phenomena are very striking. I once thought of asking a religious journal to open its columns to testimony from thoughtful, cool-headed clergy and laity of such experiences at death-beds. It might enable us to judge critically if it could be explained away as mere sentimental fancy or if the evidence were strong enough to suggest an underlying reality. It would need to be very keenly criticized. All allowance should be made, especially in the case of women, for the deceitfulness of pious fancies. But there are some cases which, if their number were large enough, would point much deeper, where there could be no case of sentimental fancies. For instance a young student in one of our city hospitals told me a curious experience lately. A little child under two years old had been rescued out of a fire and was dying badly burned. "I took the little chap on a pillow in my arms," he said, "to let him die more easily. Suddenly he stiffened himself and reached out his little hands and his face beamed with the sort of gladness that a child has in reaching to something very pleasant and in a very short time he died." My informant was by no manner of means a sentimental youth, and he was much struck with the incident. I don't know if there is much evidence of this kind. If so it would count for a good deal in forming our judgment. Our Lord speaks of those whom we have made friends on earth receiving us when we die into the everlasting habitations (Luke xvi. 9). Is it too good to believe that He might have meant some pleasant welcoming on the other side—that perhaps that little child in the hospital that night was really reaching out his little hands to some one invisible to the young student? Let us have no weak sentimentalizing, but on the other hand—is anything too good to believe as to what God might do for poor frightened souls at such a dread crisis of being?
[1] I have here freely adapted some thoughts and phrases from Edwin Arnold's Death and Afterwards.