t
succeeded in bringing into a state of preparation for heaven, and kindly
ask how he expects to bear a final and endless separation. "If thou hast
run with the footmen, and they have wearied thee, then how canst thou
contend with horses? and if in the land of peace, wherein thou
trustedst, they wearied thee, then how wilt thou do in the swelling of
Jordan?" God describes to his ancient people one of the great sorrows
which will happen to them, if they forsake him, in their separations, by
captivity, from their children: "Thy sons and thy daughters shall be
given unto another people, and thine eyes shall look, and fail with
longing, for them all the day long; and there shall be no might in thy
hand." Pains of absence, sudden convulsions of feeling at the remembered
looks, form, words, and motions of a loved one, sometimes are as when
men feel the earth quaking under them; and then, again, they entirely
prostrate us, for the moment, like a tornado. Homesickness in a foreign
land,--an ocean stretching between us and the objects of our love--is
an admonition to us with respect to future, endless separations. The
hopeless death of a child has sometimes had the effect to change the
long-established faith of a parent with regard to future retribution;
all the acknowledged principles of interpretation, all the results of
meditation and prayer, the theory of the divine government which has
been built up in the soul, till it became identified with personal
consciousness, the whole analogy of faith,--all, have been swept away by
the overmastering power of parental love for one who, when he died, left
his friends to sorrow as they that have no hope. Now, supposing a parent
to fail of heaven, and to retain his instinctive parental feelings, the
endless separation between him and his family will be a source of sorrow
which needs only to be kept up, by an ever-living memory, to constitute
all which is pictured in the boldest metaphors of inspired tongues and
pens. A father in disgrace, or under ignominy, suffers intensely when
he sees or thinks of his children, provided his natural sensibilities
are not destroyed. A father punished, hereafter, by his Redeemer and
Judge, a father banished from the company of heaven, knowing that his
family are there, and that if his influence had had its full effect,
they would all have perished with him,--or a father with a part of his
children with him in perdition, the wife and mother with one or mor