“Since I know that the law of sowing and reaping is inevitable in its operation, I begin to believe I have not found love in satisfying measure, because I have not given it out. My conception of it was the usual narrow one, and that fills one with self and selfishness. Love knows no self.
“Am I about to leave this world? No; because the world is part of the great Everywhere, which is the soul’s home. Yet it is a solemn time with me. But I shall float out on trust. I know that all is well, and never can be anything else.
“The Hereafter, so much wondered about.—What is it? Just a continuation of being—an eternal now, an endless is, an everlasting present moment.
“Shall our dead be as they were here, when we find them again? This is the cry of the bereft. They forget that nothing is the same from day to day. The child becomes a man. As a child the mother loses it whether it live or die. Change, incessant change, is the law of external nature. But the soul of the man is the soul of the child awakened and enlightened. Shall it be less, when it puts off its eternal form and becomes clothed in finer matter?
“‘Give us our dead, as they were, when they left us,’ wail the mourners at the tomb. Does any one here go away for a year or years and come back the same? Never.
“Is the future beyond death a mystery? Yes; but not more so than the future here. Does any man know what the next hour will bring upon him? Every moment ahead of us is as completely wrapped in mystery as is all that lies on the other side of the grave. In both cases we can only do our best, trusting in the love that created us, and that shapes our course.
“But the loneliness of life! Who can fathom it or explain it? and what can mitigate it? Mediocrity feels it not, for its sympathizers swarm. But in the hearts of the highest it is densest and deepest. As the soul grows upward, it feels itself isolated, and the isolation has in it a poignant anguish.
“Hours come upon us, when we feel that we touch no other soul. Even the companions we take to our hearts never enter the most solemn recesses of our nature. There the soul sits alone—always alone. And this invisible place, this awful solitude is the soul’s real world, its most fateful portion of existence. Yet into this secret place, this hidden and lonely life, we take the ideas and feelings we cherish in relation to our fellow-beings, so that though we seem to live alone in the depths of ourselves, yet we are never severed from our kind, never really solitary. The oneness of humanity asserts itself and its claims upon us, and in spite of the soul’s solitude we understand that no man liveth to himself.
“But the ache that nothing cures is always with us. We turn to the arms of human affection, it is there. We sit down to the feast of the intellect; it is there, likewise. We wander in search of new scenes; but, in the face of all that can delight the eye, it cries out from within for the satisfaction it never finds.
“Satisfied! Satisfied! Shall the yearning soul ever be satisfied? In the hope that it would, mankind constructed its far-off heaven, and said to the weary and the disappointed: ‘There ye shall be satisfied.’