oo that the closing of the eyes in the darkness of
Death is but the opening them to the light of a larger life, to the
vision of the new mysterious real world which the glare of this world
obscured. It is just what happens every day when the glare of the
sunlight, revealing to us every little flower and leaf and insect,
shuts out from us the great universe of God which stands forth in the
midnight sky. Do you know Blanco White's famous sonnet? He is
imagining what Adam must have felt as the first night fell on the
earth. All the beautiful world that he had known for but a day was
vanishing from him into darkness. Was the end of all things come
already? But lo, a stupendous unexpected miracle! Lo, as the darkness
deepened a new and more wonderful world was revealed in the sky, a
world which the sunlight had kept absolutely concealed:

Hesperus, with the host of heaven came
And lo! Creation widened on man's view
Who could have thought such marvels lay concealed
Behind thy beams, O Sun? Or who could find
Whilst flower and leaf and insect stood revealed
That to such countless orbs thou madest us blind?
Why do we then shun Death with anxious strife
If Light can thus deceive, wherefore not Life?

Yes, life shuts out greater things than light does. God teaches us
that Death is birth, that what the earth life conceals Death will
reveal; that as the babe's eyes opened from the darkness of the womb to
sunlight on this earth, so will the eyes that close in the darkness of
death open on "a light that never was on sea or land."

Section 2

And may not this act of dying be much less lonely than we think? God
sent each of us into this first stage of existence with mother and home
and loved friends about us. No one comes into this world to
loneliness. Should not that stir some hope at least that the Father
may take similar care for us in our entry on the second stage at death?
I hate sentimentalizing about it. But this is not sentimentalizing. I
have already called attention to our Lord's only account of a good
man's entrance into the Unseen. "He was carried by the angels," He
said, and I have shown you some reason to think that He meant literally
what He said--that the angels who are presented in Scripture as so
interested in our life here are equally interested in our transition to
a larger life--that loving watchers are around a soul as it passes into
the Unseen.

I sometimes wonder, too,