"_I DO_ not know how that may be," said the mother, lifting her head,
and looking through almost blinding tears, into the face of her friend.
"The poet may be right, and, "Not as a child shall I again behold him,
but the thought brings no comfort. I have lost my child, and my heart
looks eagerly forward to a reunion with him in heaven; to the blessed
hour when I shall again hold him in my arms."
"As a babe?"
"Oh, yes. As a darling babe, pure, and beautiful as a cherub."
"But would you have him linger in babyhood forever?" asked the friend.
The mother did not reply.
"Did you expect him always to remain a child here? Would perpetual
infancy have satisfied your maternal heart? Had you not already begun
to look forward to the period when intellectual manhood would come with
its crowning honors?"
"It is true," sighed the mother.
"As it would have been here, so will it be there. Here, the growth of
his body would have been parallel, if I may so speak, with the growth
of his mind. The natural and the visible would have developed in
harmony with the spiritual and the invisible. Your child would have
grown to manhood intellectually, as well as bodily. And you would not
have had it otherwise. Growth--development--the going on to perfection,
are the laws of life; and more emphatically so as appertaining to the
life of the human soul. That life, in all its high activities, burns
still in the soul of your lost darling, and he will grow, in the world
of angelic spirits to which our Father has removed him, up to the full
stature of an angel, a glorified form of intelligence and wisdom. He
cannot linger in feeble babyhood; in the innocence of simple ignorance;
but must advance with the heavenly cycles of changing and renewing
states."
"And this is all the comfort you bring to my yearning heart?" said the
mother. "My darling, if all you say be true, is lost to me forever."
"He was not yours, but God's." The friend spoke softly, yet with a firm
utterance.
"He was mine to love," replied the bereaved one.
"And your love would confer upon its precious object the richest
blessings. Dear friend! Lift your thoughts a little way above the
clouds that sorrow has gathered around your heart, and let perception
come into an atmosphere radiant with light from the Sun of Truth. Think
of your child as destined to become, in the better world to which God
has removed him, a wise and loving angel. Picture to your imagination
the higher happiness, springing from higher capacities and higher uses,
which must crown the angelic life. Doing this, and loving your lost
darling, I know that you cannot ask for him a perpetual babyhood in
heaven."
"I will ask nothing for him but what 'Our Father' pleaseth to give,"
said the mother, in calmer tones. "My love is selfish, I know. I called
that babe mine--mine in the broadest sense--yet he was God's, as every
other creature is his--one of the stones in his living temple--one of
the members of his kingdom. It does not comfort me in my great sorrow
to think that, as a child, I shall not again behold him, but rays of
new light are streaming into my mind, and I see things in new aspects
and new relations. Out of this deep affliction good will arise."
"Just as certainly," added the friend, "as that the Sun shines and the
dew falls. It will be better for you, and better for the child. To both
will come a resurrection into higher and purer life."