It matters little at what point in the perspective of the future the separation enforced by death is thought to cease. Faith and love are careless time-keepers; they have a wide and liberal eye for distance and duration; and while they can whisper to each other the words: "Meet again," they can watch and toil with wondrous patience,-- with spirit fresh and true, and, amid its most grevious loneliness, unbereft of one good sympathy. And since the Grave can bury no affections now, but only the mortal and familiar shape of their object; death has changed its whole aspect and relation to us; and we may regard it, not with passionate hate, but with quite reverence. It is a divine message from above, not an invasion from the abyss beneath; not the fiendish hand of darkness thrust up to clutch our gladness enviously away, but a rainbow gleam that descends through tears, without which we should not know the various beauties that are woven into the pure light of life. -Rev. James Martineau.
