to mere things of this earth? But that child has gone from
us,--gone into the unseen, the spiritual world. What then? Do our
affections sink back into our hearts,--become absorbed and forgotten?
O, no! They reach out after that little one; they follow him into the
unseen and spiritual world,--thus is it made a great and vivid reality
to us,--perhaps for the first time. We have talked of it, we have
believed in it; but now that our dead have gone into it, we have, as
it were, entered it ourselves. Its atmosphere is around us, chords of
affection draw us toward it, the faces of our departed ones look out
from it--and it is a reality. And is it not worth something to make it
such a reality?

We are wedded to this world. It is beautiful, it is attractive, it is
real. Immortality is a pleasant thought. The spiritual land is an object
of faith. But the separation between this and that is cold to think of,
and hard to bear. It needs something stronger than this earth to draw us
toward that spiritual world; to break some of the thousand tendrils
that bind us here. My friends, though many powerful appeals, many solid
arguments, cannot break our affections from this earth, the hand of a
departed child can do it. The voice that calls us to unseen realities,
that bids us prepare for the heavenly land, that says from heights of
spiritual bliss and purity, "Come up hither;"--that voice that we loved
so on earth, and gladly can we rise and follow it.

Behold, then, what a little child can perform for us through its death!
It makes real and attractive to us that spiritual world to which it has
gone, and calls our affections from earth to that true life which is the
great end of our being, which is the object of all our discipline, our
mingled joy and suffering, here upon this earth. That little child, gone
from its sufferings of early,--gone

"Gentle and undefiled, with blessings on its head,"--

has it indeed become a very angel of God for us, and is it calling us
to a more spiritual life, and does it win us to heaven? Is its memory
around us like a pure presence into which no thought of sin can readily
enter? Or is it with us, even yet, a spiritual companion of our ways?
From being the guarded and the guided, has it risen in infant innocence,
yet in the knowledge and majesty of the immortal life, to be the guard
and the guide? Does it, indeed, make our hearts softer and purer,
and cause us to think more of duty, and live more