r know that the spirit next us was that of a mother or husband
or friend or child. We know that the Paradise and earth lives come
from the same God who is the same always. Into this life He never
sends us alone. There is the mother love waiting and the family
affection around us, and as we grow older love and friendship and
association with others is one of the great needs and pleasures of life
and one of the chief means of training the higher side of us. Unless
His method changes we may surely hope that He will do something similar
hereafter, for love is the plant that must overtop all others in the
whole Kingdom of God.

Again, love and friendship must be LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP for SOME ONE.
If we don't know any one, then we cannot love, and human love must die
without an object. But the Bible makes it a main essential of the
religious life that "He that loveth God love his brother also."

If we shall not know one another, why then this undying memory of
departed ones, this aching void that is never filled on earth? Alas
for us! For we are worse off than the lower animals. The calf is
taken from the cow, the kittens are taken from their mother and in a
few days they are forgotten. But the poor human mother never forgets.
When her head is bowed with age, when she has forgotten nearly all else
on earth you can bring the tears into her eyes by speaking of the child
that died in her arms forty years ago. Will God disappoint that tender
love, that one supreme thing which is "the most like God within the
soul"?

Section 4

There can be no real reason, I repeat, for doubting the fact of
recognition unless the Bible should distinctly state the contrary. And
so far from doing this the Bible, in its very few references to the
Hereafter life, always assumes the fact and never in any way
contradicts it.

Notice first the curiously persistent formula in which Old Testament
chroniclers speak of death. "He died in a good old age and WAS
GATHERED UNTO HIS PEOPLE and they buried him." "Gathered unto his
people" can hardly mean burial with his people, for the burial is
mentioned after it. It comes between the dying and the burial. And I
note that even at Moses' burial on the lone mountain top this phrase is
solemnly used. "The Lord said unto him get thee up into the mount and
die in the mount AND BE GATHERED TO THY PEOPLE." Miriam was buried in
the distant desert, Aaron's body lay on the slopes of Mount Hor, and