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The Shadowed Home and the Light Beyond ...
The Shadowed Home and the Light Beyond Author:Edward Henry Bickersteth Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE VOICE OF THE SORROWERS. WE brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away ;... more » blessed be the Name of the Lord. |WO voices have been heard, that of the Saviour saying, I am the resurrection and the life; and that of the holy dead, I know that my Redeemer liveth. Shall there be no response from the sorrowing mourners who are following the tabernacle of their beloved to its chamber of peace ? Shall these voices from the Throne and from the Paradise of Go awaken no echo on earth ? Hearken, the widowed Church replies, We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away ; blessed be the Name of the Lord. We confess that we are strangersand sojourners on the earth, as all our fathers were. We can call nothing earthly our own. We are stewards for a little while of the precious gifts entrusted to us by God. We came into the world naked and helpless. He clothed us with the goodly raiment of His bounty, and enriched us with innumerable tokens of His love. But these, though they are pledges of the robes of immortality and of the true riches of heaven, were given us in their present form only for the brief journey of life. Shall we marvel, shall we murmur, that as that journey closes with those we love, and as it will shortly close with ourselves, they and we are called to put off the travelling-dress and lay aside the treasures, which were entrusted to us for our use and delight on the roadway which lay betwixt us and our home ? The first clause of the response is from that noble passage in the epistle to Timothy where St. Paul, after sternly rebuking those who esteemed godliness for the sake of gain, affirms that godliness with cont...« less