Let the Stoics say what they will, so long as we remain human we shall always open our breasts to those warm loves that make the sweetness of existence, if also they make its bitterest pain.

It is written that the last enemy to be vanquished is death. We should begin early in life to vanquish this enemy by obliterating every trace of the fear of death from our minds. Then can we turn to life and fill the whole horizon of our souls with it, turn with added zest to all the serious tasks which it imposes and to the pure delights which here and there it affords.

There are hours of great loneliness, when the frost of desolation penetrates into the very soul, when the burden seems too heavy to bear, and the draught of life too bitter to swallow. But the very keenness of the ordeal begets the strength to bear it, and patience and unselfish resignation will come as with the rustling of angel’s wings to dry our scalding tears.

When the light of the sun shines through a prism it is broken into beautiful colours, and when the prism is shattered, still the light remains. So does the light of life shine resplendent in the forms of our friends, and so, when their forms are broken, still their life remains; and in that life we are united with them; for the life of their life is also our life, and we are one with them by ties indissoluble.

They say that it is a blessed relief in times of grief to shed tears. But a more blessed relief than to shed tears is to wipe away the tears from others’ eyes.

In hours of great sorrow we turn in vain to Nature for an inspiring thought. We question the sleepless stars; they are cold and distant. The winds blow, the rivers run their course, the seasons change; they are careless of man. Only in the human world do we find an answering echo to our needs.

The body is incapable of supporting for longer than a few brief years the weight of the life that dwells within it. The vehicle cannot sustain the content. The instrument falls short of the demands upon it, and crumbles into ruins. But in its ruin it sets off, in tragic contrast, the grandeur of the power which, for a time, employed it for its uses, a power greater than itself, greater than any instrument, whose glory rises above the ruins and gilds them with unearthly splendour in departing.

We are soldiers fighting a good fight. The call that awakens us out of despair in times of affliction is the trumpet-call of duty, summoning us back to the battle.

The experience of progress in the past, the hope of progress toward perfection in the future, is the redeeming feature of life; it is the one and only solace that never fails.

It is the nature of the noble and the good and the wise that they impart to us of their nobility and their goodness and their wisdom while they live, making it natural for us to breathe the air they breathe and giving us confidence in our own untested powers. And the same influence in more ethereal fashion they continue to exert after they are gone.

The condition of all progress is experience. We go wrong a thousand times before we find the right path. We struggle, and grope, and hurt ourselves until we learn the use of things, and this is true of things spiritual as well as of material things. Pain is unavoidable, but it acquires a new and higher meaning when we perceive that it is the price humanity must pay for an invaluable good.

The consolations of the moral ideal are vigorous. They do not encourage idle sentiment. They recommend to the sufferer action. Our loss, indeed, will always remain loss, and no preaching or teaching can ever make it otherwise. But the question is whether it shall weaken and embitter, or strengthen and purify us, and lead us to raise to the dead we mourn a monument in our lives that shall be better than any pillared chapel or storied marble tomb.

The criterion of all right relations whatsoever is that we are helped by them. And so, too, the criterion of right relations to the dead is that we are helped, not weakened and disabled, by them. Does the remembrance of our departed beloved ones have this effect upon us? Does it make us better and purer men and women than we should otherwise have been, stronger if not happier? Do they come to us as gentle monitors in silent hours of thought? Does their approving smile stimulate us to greater bravery for the right, to more earnest self-conquest? Does the pressure of their invisible hands guide us in the better way? If so, then truly blessed is their memory. Then will the pain which is associated with the thought of them gradually be diminished; the wild regrets, the unappeasable longings which, at times, assert themselves gradually be pacified. Then will the bitter sense of the loss we have sustained be overborne by the consciousness of the treasure of their influence which still remains to us, and which can never be taken from us.

Activity is our great resource. To be active is to live. The glow that comes with activity supplies the heat that supports our mental and moral energies. Activity is the antidote to the depressions that lower our vitality, whether they come from physical or psychical causes.

Those whom we love are not given to us merely for our joy or our happiness. Their truest ministry consists in being to us revealers of the divine. They quicken in us the seed of better thoughts, help us to estimate rightly the things that are worth trying for and the things that are not worth trying for; help us to become more equal to the standard of our own best insight, and grow into our truer selves. And this influence abides when they are gone.

Let us learn from the lips of death the lessons of life. Let us live truly while we live, live for what is true and good and lasting. And let the memory of our dead help us to do this. For they are not wholly separated from us, if we remain loyal to them. In spirit they are with us. And we may think of them as silent, invisible, but real presences in our households.

In a storm at sea when the peril is extreme, the captain lashes himself to the mast in order that he may bring the vessel safely through the raging seas. So, in times of great affliction, we should lash ourselves to the mast of the ship of life, by the cord of duty.

The bitter, yet merciful, lesson which death teaches us is to distinguish the gold from the tinsel, the true values from the worthless chaff.

The terrible events of life are great eye-openers. They force us to learn that which it is wholesome for us to know, but which habitually we try to ignore—namely, that really we have no claim on a long life; that we are each of us liable to be called off at any moment, and that the main point is not how long we live, but with what meaning we fill the short allotted span—for short it is at best.

The wine of pleasure which once we quaffed so passionately, where is it now? The cup is empty and only the lees remain, and they are as wormwood to the taste. The flowers which we wove into chaplets at our feasts to wreathe ourselves withal, they are withered and noxious. But the good deeds we have done, the nobler traits of character we have developed—these are imperishable.

As in every battle, so in the great battle of Humanity, the fallen and wounded, too, have a share in the victory; by their sufferings they have helped, and the greenest wreaths belong to them.

We conceive of ourselves as somehow identical in being with those who are to come after us; for it is in the nature of spirit that its separate members, dispersed though they be in space and time, are still, in essence, one. So that we may say concerning those who come after us, and who will reap the benefit of our labours, that we ourselves shall attain to increasing perfection in them.

All of us have felt after some great bereavement the beneficent influence of mere work. Even the mechanical part of our daily tasks affords us some relief. The knowledge that something must be done prevents us from brooding over our griefs, and forces us back into the active currents of life.

The resources of the intellect, too, stand us in good stead in times of trouble. The pursuit of knowledge is directed toward large impersonal ends: into the calm and silent realm of thought the feelings can gain no entrance. There, after the first spasms of emotion have subsided, we may find at least a temporary relief—there for hours we drink in a welcome oblivion. But mere plodding toil and mere intellectual preoccupation do not suffice, the discharge of the moral duties in the light of the moral perfection to which they point alone can really sustain and console us.

In alleviating the misery of others our own misery will be alleviated; in healing there is cure.

When we endure some heavy affliction we are apt to say, “Oh, there is no suffering like my suffering. There is no one who bears such a load as mine.” This is a mistake—the guilty suffer more than the afflicted. Better a thousand times death than shame. There are depths below depths, abysses below abysses.

Poverty, Sickness, Sorrow, and the experience of Sin are the great instrumentalities for moralising our natures. They are dark gateways through which we pass into a temple of light—into the innermost sanctuary of a truer life. Yes, for the guilty also there is consolation and redemption. “Come ye that are heavy laden unto me, no matter how heavily laden with sin,” says every religion, “and I will give you rest.” For those who have transgressed the moral law realise more fully than others do the sublime majesty of the power which they have affronted. And in a sense greater than words can convey, those who have had the profoundest experience of guilt are more capable than others of a divine transfiguration of their natures.

We are not free to stand aside in idle woe, but should make for the departed a memorial in our lives and complete their half-completed tasks. The widowed wife shall be both mother and father to her children; the afflicted husband both father and mother to his children.

Faith in the sublime ideal of humanity is the saving faith that will work miracles to-day, as of old at Cana, that will change the waters of earth’s grief and misery into the wondrous wine of life and joy.

Death and the dead should be associated with what is brightest and purest in Nature, with glorious sunsets, with the dawn of summer mornings, with the fragrance of Spring.