ible?
Nay, all that is best and noblest and purest within us rejects such a
faith in Absolute Evil as the power that has created and rules the
world. In the presence of love we feel that we behold that which must
belong to a good God and therefore cannot die. Destruction cannot touch
it. The grave cannot hold it. Loving and being loved, we dare to stand
in the very doorway of the tomb, and assert the power of an endless
life.

And it seems to me that this courage never comes to us so fully as when
we are brought in closest contact with death, when we are brought face
to face with that dread shadow and forced either to deny its power, once
and forever, or to give up everything and die with our hopes. I wish
that I could make this clear to you as it lies in my own experience.
Perhaps in trying to do it I should speak closer to your own heart than
in any other way. For surely

"There is no flock, however watched and tended
But one dead lamb is there.
There is no fireside, howsoe'er defended
But has a vacant chair."

A flower grew in your garden. You delighted in its beauty and fragrance.
It gave you all it had to give, but it did not love you. It could not.
When the time came for it to die, you were sorry. But it did not seem to
you strange or unnatural. There was no waste. Its mission was fulfilled.
You understood why its petals should fall, its leaf wither, its root
and branch decay. And even if a storm came and snapped it, still there
was nothing lost that was indispensable, nothing that could not be
restored.

A child grew in your household, dearly loved and answering your love.
You saw that soul unfold, learning to know the evil from the good,
learning to accept duty and to resist selfishness, learning to be brave
and true and kind, learning to give you day by day a deeper and a richer
sympathy, learning to love God and to pray and to be good. And then
perhaps you saw that young heart being perfected under the higher and
holier discipline of suffering, bearing pain patiently, facing trouble
and danger like a hero, not shrinking even from the presence of death,
but trusting all to your love and to God's, and taking just what came
from day to day, from hour to hour. And then suddenly the light went out
in the shining eyes. The brave heart stopped. The soul was gone. Lost,
perished, blotted out forever in the darkness of death? Ah, no; you know
better than that. That clear, dawning intelligence,