on.
This, what is it but great Nature's testimony, God's silent
avowal, that we are to meet in eternity? Can the fearful anguish
of bereavement be gratuitous? can the yearning prophecies of the
smitten heart be all false? Belief in reunion hereafter is
spontaneously adopted by humanity. We therefore esteem it divinely
ordered or true. Without that soothing and sustaining trust, the
unrelieved, intolerable wretchedness in many cases would burst
through the fortress of the mind, hurl reason from its throne, and
tear the royal affections and their attendants in the trampled
dust of madness. Many a rarely gifted soul, unknown in his
nameless privacy of life, has been so conjoined with a worthy
peer, through precious bonds of unutterable sympathy, that, rather
than be left behind, "the divided half of such a friendship as had
mastered time," he has prayed that they, dying at once, might,
involved together, hover across the dolorous strait to the other
shore, and

"Arrive at last the blessed goal
Where He that died in Holy Land
Might reach them out the shining hand
And take them as a single soul."

Denied that inmost wish, the rest of his widowed life below has
been one melancholy strain of "In Memoriam." Many a faithful and
noble mourner, whose garnered love and hope have been blighted for
this world, would tell you that, without meeting his lost ones
there, heaven itself would be no heaven to him. In such a state of
soul we must expect to know again in an unfading clime the
cherished dead. That belief is of Divine inspiration, an
arrangement to heal the deadly wounds of sorrow. It is madness not
to think it a verity. Who believes, as he shall float through the
ambrosial airs of heaven, he could touch, in passing, the radiant
robes of his chosen friends without a thrill of recognition, the
prelude to a blissful and immortal communion? Is there not truth
in the poet's picture of the meeting of child and parent in heaven?

4 Harbaugh, The Heavenly Recognition. Gisborne, Recollections of
Friends in the World to Come. Muston, Perpetuation of Christian
Friendship.

"It was not, mother, that I knew thy face: The luminous eclipse
that is on it now, Though it was fair on earth, would have made it
strange Even to one who knew as well as he loved thee; But my
heart cried out in me, Mother!"

Think of the unfathomable yearnings, the infinite ecstasies of
desire and faith from age to age swelling in the very heart of the
wo