If a God had died, the terror and grief could barely have exceeded that I once saw in the case of a mother who had set her affections on the child we had met to carry to the grave. Seated at the head of the coffin, she seemed a statue; the grand work of some master hand, to represent the deepest, blackest grief. No tears were on her bloodless cheek. Fixed on the coffin, her eyes never left it. She neither moved nor spake, as on her face one could read these words, “my heart is withered like grass.” Absorbed in shadow, it mattered as little to her as to the dead, who went out, or who came in. At length the moment came to remove the body. Then, as when the heavens that have been gathering blackness break out into a blaze of flame and roar of thunder, burst the storm. The form that had looked more like lifeless marble than one animate with life? now sprung up, threw itself on the coffin, clung to it with wails to pierce a heart of stone; and, when gentle force was employed to unloose her arms, she walked to the door patting the poor coffin; and saw it borne out of her sight with an expression of agony, which, as she fell fainting back into the arms of kind neighbors, seemed to cry, “Ye have taken away my god, and what have I more?”
It is not so we are to love our dear ones. We are to love our children as they are to obey their parents, “in the Lord;” never forgetting that He who lends may resume His gifts whensoever it pleases Him, and so ever seeking our nurseries to rear plants for heaven, and so train up our children in the faith, that we shall have the infinite consolation of knowing, if death enters our house and plucks them from our arms, that our loss is their gain; that if a chair in the circle by our fireside is empty, a blood-bought throne is filled in heaven; that if there is one voice less in the psalm when we are assembled for worship, there is one more ringing sweet and clear in glory, praising Him through whose dying love and in blissful presence we shall join our loved—to weep and to part no more. Blessed Hope! Sweet Comfort! Everlasting Consolation!— GUTHRIE.
