e, and there,
behind the engine-house with its heaps of scoriae and rubbish, lay a
little trim ugly burial-ground, with a dismal mortuary, upon which
some pathetic and tawdry taste had been spent. There in rows lay
the mouldering bones of the failures of life and old sin; not even a
headstone over each with a word of hope, nothing but a number on a tin
tablet. Nothing more incredibly sordid could be devised. One thought of
the sad rite, the melancholy priest, the handful of relatives glad at
heart that the poor broken life was over and the wretched associations
at an end. Yet even that sight too warned one not to linger, and that
the end was not yet. Presently, in the gathering twilight, I was making
my way through the streets of the city. The dusk had obliterated all
that was mean and dreary. Nothing but the irregular housefronts stood up
against the still sky, the lighted windows giving the sense of home and
ease. A quiet bell rang for vespers in a church tower, and as I passed
I heard an organ roll within. It all seemed a sweetly framed message to
the soul, a symbol of joy and peace.

But then I reflected that the danger was of selecting, out of the
symbols that crowded around one on every side, merely those that
ministered to one's own satisfaction and contentment. The sad horror of
that other place, the little bare place of desolate graves--that must be
a symbol as well, that must stand as a witness of some part of the awful
mind of God, of the strange flaw or rent that seems to run through His
world. It may be more comfortable, more luxurious to detach the symbol
that testifies to the satisfaction of our needs; but not thus do we draw
near to truth and God. And then I thought that perhaps it was best, when
we are secure and careless and joyful, to look at times steadily into
the dark abyss of the world, not in the spirit of morbidity, not with
the sense of the macabre--the skeleton behind the rich robe, death at
the monarch's shoulder; but to remind ourselves, faithfully and wisely,
that for us too the shadow waits; and then that in our moments of
dreariness and heaviness we should do well to seek for symbols of our
peace, not thrusting them peevishly aside as only serving to remind us
of what we have lost and forfeited, but dwelling on them patiently and
hopefully, with a tender onlooking to the gracious horizon with all
its golden lights and purple shadows. And thus not in a mercantile
mood trafficking for our d