n, without spot or blemish, into the arms of love.

Such, surely, is the heart of the comfort the Lord will give those whose
love is now making them mourn; and their present blessedness must be the
expectation of the time when the true lover shall find the restored the
same as the lost--with precious differences: the things that were not
like the true self, gone or going; the things that were loveliest,
lovelier still; the restored not merely more than the lost, but more the
person lost than he or she that was lost. For the things which made him
or her what he or she was, the things that rendered lovable, the things
essential to the person, will be more present, because more developed.

Whether or not the Lord was here thinking specially of the mourners for
the dead, as I think he was, he surely does not limit the word of
comfort to them, or wish us to believe less than that his father has
perfect comfort for every human grief. Out upon such miserable
theologians as, instead of receiving them into the good soil of a
generous heart, to bring forth truth an hundred fold, so cut and pare
the words of the Lord as to take the very life from them, quenching all
their glory and colour in their own inability to believe, and still
would have the dead letter of them accepted as the comfort of a creator
to the sore hearts he made in his own image! Here, 'as if they were
God's spies,' some such would tell us that the Lord proclaims the
blessedness of those that mourn for their sins, and of them only. What
mere honest man would make a promise which was all a reservation, except
in one unmentioned point! Assuredly they who mourn for their sins will
be gloriously comforted, but certainly such also as are bowed down with
any grief. The Lord would have us know that sorrow is not a part of
life; that it is but a wind blowing throughout it, to winnow and
cleanse. Where shall the woman go whose child is at the point of death,
or whom the husband of her youth has forsaken, but to her Father in
heaven? Must she keep away until she knows herself sorry for her sins?
How should that woman care to be delivered from her sins, how could she
accept any comfort, who believed the child of her bosom lost to her for
ever? Would the Lord have such a one be of good cheer, of merry heart,
because her sins were forgiven her? Would such a mother be a woman of
whom the saviour of men might have been born? If a woman forget the
child she has borne and nourish