Page:Dealings with the dead.djvu/119

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DEALINGS WITH THE DEAD
113

fervent, ambitious, sensitive, boisterous at times, and, as a general thing, superficial and changeable. During the third decade, when common sense, practical rationality, and just and noble views of life and its obligations shall have taken the place of their previous state—when cleanliness, light, air, and sunshine, daily-acted prayers instead of loud-mouthed lip-worship, constitute some of the elements of their religion—and when their bodies have become purified by proper living, eating, drinking and labor—their children will be born with larger brains, better bodies, nobler appearances; and their career through life will correspond. All this is as true as the Eternal Gospel, and shows that, although ill and evil are deeply rooted in the human soil, yet they are by no means ineradicable.

All men know that they often feel more love and friendship for strangers than they do for their own blood brothers; and friendship, when real, and not based upon physical properties, or selfish motives, is a thing that unquestionably survives the ordeal of the grave. Persons thus bound together will, and do meet, whether of the same lineage or not. But it often happens that the best of earthly friends belong to and represent two distinct orders of soul; and it may be that they pertain to orders so widely separated, that on earth, as in the heavens, they must lose each other, and strike hands and hearts over a gulf impassable by either. Do you not see hundreds of proofs of this all around you on the earth? A tender, gentle, delicate girl often clings, with all the desperate energy of idolization, to some rough, coarse, uncouth, unkempt and brutish fellow. The love f that poor heart will redeem that man from many a