mself
is. But death is the climax of life. For if all life is an argument
for death, then so also all death is an argument for life.

Jowett says, in one of his letters, "I cannot sympathize in all the
grounds of consolation that are sometimes offered on these melancholy
occasions, but there are two things which have always seemed to me
unchangeable: first, that the dead are in the hands of God, who can do
for them more than we can ask or have; and secondly, with respect to
ourselves, that such losses deepen our views of life, and make us feel
that we would not always be here." These are two noble grounds of
consolation, and they are enough.

Death is the great argument for immortality. We cannot believe that
the living, loving soul has ceased to be. We cannot believe that all
those treasures of mind and heart are squandered in empty air. We will
not believe it. When once we understand the meaning of the spiritual,
we see the absolute certainty of eternal life; we need no arguments for
the persistence of being.

To appear for a little time and then vanish away, is the outward
biography of all men, a circle of smoke that breaks, a bubble on the
stream that bursts, a spark put out by a breath.

But there is another biography, a deeper and a permanent one, the
biography of the soul. Everything that _appears_ vanishes away: that
is its fate, the fate of the everlasting hills as well as of the vapor
that caps them. But that which does not appear, the spiritual and
unseen, which we in our folly sometimes doubt because it does not
appear, is the only reality; it is eternal and passeth not away. The
material in nature is only the garb of the spiritual, as speech is the
clothing of thought. With our vulgar standards we often think of the
thought as the unsubstantial and the shadowy, and the speech as the
real. But speech dies upon the passing wind; the thought alone
remains. We consider the sound to be the music, whereas it is only the
expression of the music, and vanishes away. Behind the material world,
which waxes old as a garment, there is an eternal principle, the
thought of God it represents. Above the sounds there is the music that
can never die. Beneath our lives, which vanish away, there is a vital
thing, spirit. We cannot locate it and put our finger on it; that is
why it is permanent. The things we can put our finger on are the
things which appear, and therefore which fade and die.

So, death t