The dead are not dead if we have loved them truly. In our own lives we can give them a kind of immortality. Let us arise and take up the work they have left unfinished, and preserve intact the treasures they have won, and round out, if possible, the circuit of their being to the fulness of an ampler orbit in our own.

They that have left us are not afar; their presence is near and real, a silent and august companionship. In still hours of meditation, in the stress of action, in the midst of trials and temptations, we hear their voices whispering words of cheer or warning, and our deeds are, in a sense, their deeds, and our lives their lives.

So does the light of other days still shine in the bright-hued flowers that clothe our fields. So do they who have long since been gathered into the silent city of the dead still live in the deeds we do for their sake, in the earnest effort we put forth toward greater rectitude, patience, purity, under the influence of their unforgettable memories.

The conservation of moral energy is in a certain sense as true as the conservation of mechanical energy. We are not dust merely that returns to dust; we are not summer flies that bask in the sunshine of a passing day; we are not bounded in our influence by the narrow boundary of our years.

In aspiring to noble ends, the soul takes on something of the greatness of that which it truly admires.

The evident disparity between virtue and happiness has led men to take refuge in the thought of compensation hereafter, and the necessity of a future state in which the good shall be rewarded and the evil punished has been deduced from the very inequities and moral inconsistencies of our present experience. The argument in this specific form is worthless, but it is based, nevertheless, upon a capital truth—the truth, namely, that our moral ideal is destined to be realised, though we may not know how it will be realised.

Vast possibilities suggest themselves to us of an order of existence wholly different from all that we have ever known; a gleam reaches the eye, as it were, from a far celestial land, and the crimson dawn of a Sun of Truth appears, to which the splendours of our earthly mornings are as obscurity.