brilliancy of intellect and
genius. These chiefly halo the homes of "the grand old masters" of
poetry, painting, eloquence, and martial glory. These attract to
their disks pilgrims the most numerous and enthusiastic. But, as
the nearest stars are brightest, not largest, so these biographs are
brightest on their earth-side. There are thousands of less sharp
and spangling lustre to the eyes of the multitude, which shine with
tenfold more brilliancy from their eternity-face. These are they
that halo the homes of good men, whose great hearts drank in the
life of God's love in perpetual streams, and distilled it like a
luminous dew around them; men whose thoughts were not mere
scintillations of genius, but living labors of beneficence, bearing
the proof as well as promise of that immortality guaranteed to the
deeds of earth's saints. If the soul, after such long isolation, is
to take again to its embrace so much of the old human corporeity it
wore here below, does it transcend the prerogative of hope in the
great resurrection to believe that these biographs of God's loving
children on earth shall be taken up whole into the same immortality
as the bodies in which they worked His will among men? Is the faith
too fanciful or irreverent that believes, that the corridors and
inner temples of Heaven's Glory will be hung with these biographs of
His servants surrounding, like stars, the light-flood of His love
that radiated from His cross on earth? Is it too presumptuous to
think and say, that such pictures will be as precious in His sight
as any graven by the lives of angels on their outward or homeward
flights of duty and delight? These are they, therefore, that shall
give to the earth all the immortality to which it shall attain.
These are they that shall take up into the brilliant existence of
the hereafter, ten thousand sections of its corporeity; portions of
its surface, perhaps, as substantial as the human form that the
souls of men shall wear in another world. These are they that shall
shine as the stars, when those beaming so brilliantly in our eyes
around the shrines of mere intellect and genius, shall have "paled
their ineffectual fires" before the efflux of diviner light. Let
him, then, of thoughtful and attentive faculties think on these
great and holy possibilities, when he treads within the pale of a
good man's life, whose labors for human happiness "follow him"
according to divine promise; not out of the