87. Resurrection
Resurrection
WORLD A GRAVE.—The grave is a bulwark cast up between time and Eternity. Our eye may not pierce it. Below works corruption, and the form which once contained a beloved spirit is crumbling into earth. We also are following after. Soon our dust will rest there too; the dust of our children and of our children’s children will soon be added. Generations bloom and generations fade; those who enter upon the surface of the earth are sinking again below it. The world is nothing more than one single, great grave. As it swing’s around the sun in its accustomed orbit, like a true mother it carries the dust of her child in her bosom!
PALERMO VAULT.—Madame de Gasparin visited a great vault at Palermo, where thousands of skeletons, in every variety of position, were seen. There were the mingled bones and the nameless dust, an indistinguishable mass! She took a handful of the dust, gazed upon it, and was filled with doubt of the possibility of the resurrection of the dead. She hastened back into the daylight, when she suddenly saw the symbol I.N.R.I.; and a voice echoed in her heart, “Believest thou that I am able to do this?” She responded. “Yea, verily, Thou wilt do it;” and from that day forth never doubted the doctrine of the resurrection.
SNOW-COVERED SOLDIERS.—An army chaplain tells of having bivouacked with his brigade upon an open field, each soldier wrapped in his blanket, but with nothing over him but the cold, cloudy sky. On arising next morning, all over that field were little mounds like new-made graves, each covered with a drapery of snow, which had fallen two or three inches deep during the night, and covered every sleeping soldier, as if in the winding-sheet of death. While he was gazing upon the strange spectacle, here and there a man began to stir, rise, shake himself, and stand forth in momentary amazement at the sight. It was a symbol of the resurrection.
EMBLEMS OF THE RESURRECTION.— God has filled all Nature with continual emblems of this doctrine. What is night but the death of day? What is morning but its resurrection from the shades of darkness? We see the insect-tribe give their evidence—sometimes crawling, as a worm, then lying in apparent torpor; then bursting the shell, and, with wings of beauty and activity, skimming the atmosphere.
RETAIN IDENTITY.—As, when different seeds are cast into the ground together, each produces its proper herb; so the bodies of men, though mingled in the dust, shall each receive its own identity in the resurrection. NO GRAVE HIDDEN.—Alaric, the King of the Goths, had a curious grave. He had besieged, and levied an enormous tribute upon Rome, and was proceeding to Sicily, when he died suddenly. It is related that his victorious army caused their captives to turn aside the course of the river Busentinus, to make his grave in the bed of the river; and then, when they had buried him in it, and restored the waters to their former channel, they slew upon the spot all who had been engaged in the work, that none might tell the secret to the Romans.
MONICA’S CONFIDENCE.—When friends of Monica, mother of Augustine, expressed their wonder that she did not fear to leave her body so far from her country, she said: “Nothing is far from God, and I do not fear that He will not know where to find me at the resurrection.”