A Legacy of Pleasant Memories
A mother in heaven can be brought to view and a heavenly childhood reinstated when visiting the spot where sacred dust is buried. This is the place that faithful fantasy most frequently portrays.
"Oft, in the stilly night,
Ere Slumber's chain has bound me,
Fond Memory brings the light
Of other days around me;
The smiles, the tears,
Of boyhood's years,
The words of love then spoken;
The eyes that shone,
Now dimmed and gone,
The cheerful hearts now broken!"
I hold the sentiment of him who said, "My heart melts with compassion for the motherless affectionate lonesome boy who suffers for the want of intelligent sympathy, for someone who marks his little sorrows, binds up his wounds, wipes off his tears, and kisses him as he goes to bed." Our deepest feelings require a foothold on the earth. Like Antaeus they get strength by touching the soil. There must be certain spots around which patriotic feeling and family feeling and religious feeling can rally, like Bunker Hill and Lexington and Concord and Appomattox and Yorktown and Independence Hall and the old home and the old church. Where feeling is wide-spread it needs certain locations and community centers to give it points of contact with the solid, visible, tangible earth. The influence of a family would be deplorably weakened if once for all it should be detached from any specific habitation that it could claim as a home. Home, home, there is no place like it. "A charm from the skies seems to hallow us there."
At Torwood two ministers met and spent a day in high spiritual communion. Later one of them, Mr. Kidd, of Queen's Ferry parish, having sore trial and depression of spirits, sent a note to his friend, the minister at Culross, informing him of his troubles and dejection of spirits and desiring a visit. "I cannot go," was the reply, "but tell Mr. Kidd to remember Torwood." The answer was effective. That was a place. It had its atmosphere that could be recalled. The Pilgrim in his progress believes in what he sees from the mountain. When on low ground he cannot quite discern the celestial city, he keeps his course, staking everything upon the experience at an earlier well-remembered place.
The World Teaches an Attentive Mind
When revisiting the earth surprise was expressed that we carried so much feeling into the pilgrimage. Said a business man, "You have very many old residenters where you live. They have some beautiful graveyards in Boston. When any one dies here, why he's dead. He's just dead. We mustn't expect anything more from him because the man is dead. We try to get someone to take his place. That poor fellow is dead." Marshall Field is dead in Chicago; Phillips Brooks, in Boston; Edward Payson, in Portland; and Johns Hopkins, in Baltimore; Peter Cooper, in New York, yet in their cities they are an active force and even in their ashes live their wonted fires. Meade and Howard and Sickles and Pickett and Longstreet and Lee live evermore. A visit to the best marked monumental field in the world makes you feel afresh the grandeur of their achievement.
"Death may rob us of the painter
But his works to us belong,
He may steal from us the singer,
But he cannot seize the song.
And, though he may take the lives that
Mean our share of joy, yet he
May not rob us of the treasure
Of a single memory!"
"If you wound the tree in its youth," we read in the story of an African farm, "the bark will cover over the gash, but when the tree is very old, peeling the bark off and looking carefully you will see the scar there still. All that is buried is not dead." And that is a fact too. I bow my head now and grieve over certain acts or rebukes or injustices or humiliations or wounds. They all come in review, they are all there; I come upon them on occasion. Someone has told us that the pearls of life and of home, like the pearls of the deep sea, grow around wounds and are the costly burials of pain.