| Strength and Beauty |
Chapter 24 |
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But that is not the whole meaning of the Easter lesson. Perhaps we narrow it too much. We keep its comfort for the days when death is in our home, when we are standing beside the graves of our loved ones. Blessed is its message then! It tells us that what to our holden eyes seems death is life, and that the grave is but a little chamber of peace where our dear one shall sleep until the morning.
“These ashes, too, this little dust,
Our Father’s care shall keep,
Till the last angel rise and break
The long and dreary sleep.
“Then love’s soft dew o’er every eye
Shall shed its mildest rays.
And the long silent dust shall burst
With shouts of endless praise.”
But the lesson reaches out and covers all life. It sheds a glory over every sorrow. It whispers hope in every experience of loss. It tells of victory, not only over death, but over everything in which men seem to suffer defeat, over all grief, pain, and trial. Jesus himself stated the great principle of the resurrection victory when he said, “Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth by itself alone; but if it die, it beareth much fruit.” The dropping of the grain into the earth, to perish there, is not misfortune, not the wasting, the losing, the perishing, of the grain; it is but the way by which it reaches its full development and comes to its normal fruitfulness.
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