I wrote the other day to a friend about her sister-in-law’s death, and this was the last sentence of the letter which she wrote in reply:
“I do not know if he”—that was her brother—“told you how beautiful it was at the last; how S——’s face lighted up with such an expression of surprise and adoration, with her eyes open to their fullest extent, and then it was all over. Only a glimpse into the life that was not to end could have brought such a look to a human face.”
“And that life,” said He Who was the life, “I brought with Me and will give to you.”
Let us lift our hearts to the life that shall endless be, to the liberty on which there never lay a chain, to the light of the land that hath no need of any sun, because the “Lamb is the light thereof,” the land of the new morning and the tearless life. The thief cometh—let him not come in!—only to kill, and to steal, and to destroy. “I am come, and I stand at the door and ask you now to let Me in, that you may have life abundantly.”
As these lectures close I would press all this in the most earnest and personal terms upon each one individually. The processes of social and moral progress in humanity are retarded or broken down because they are not carried on a volume of adequate spiritual life in men. There ought to be a Kingdom of Living Love and Brotherly Will on the earth. And some day there will be, but there is not now and there cannot be until the anemia of man is healed, and it can be healed in only one way—by more life in man, by life abounding in men. The commercial and materialistic solution of the world’s problem has been fully tried. For a generation it has been preached and practiced as the one saving gospel and out of the depths to which it brought us we begin to turn heavenward again. The day for a new creed has dawned—the old creed of truth and hope and freedom and life, of the wealth and glory of a city unseen as yet, hid in the heavens and only possible on the earth as drawn down by men to whom the invisible things are the surest of all realities and who live and are strong in God.
Printed in the United States of America
INSPIRATION FOR MEN
ROBERT W. BOLWELL