A Memory of Childhood [pp. 270-275]

A Memory of Childhood.
from the body, and I shall see him no
more. I did not then fully comprehend
the mystery of this organism, and I asked,
where will this soul be when the body
is buried in the earth? Will it linger
near the grave, and watch over it, or will
it fly away to some world floating through
space and enter into new relations with
some other organism?"
I propounded these queries to my father,
and he answered me in the expressive
language of Job, "then shall the body
return unto the dust as it was, and the
spirit unto God who gave it;" but still
I was not satisfied, for it is hard for
a child to understand how this wondrous
mechanism of the human body, with its
flesh, bones, blood, nerves, tissues and
muscles, sprang from dust, and must be
resolved into dust again.
And hLen he told me more of the
mystery without giving me comfort. The
boy was in heaven, but heaven seemed
so far away from me and from earth, and
that grave would always be near to remind me of my loss.
At last I went to the Bible and read of
heaven, if haply I might know what and
where it was. Long after Goodwin was
dead, I continued to study the inspired
page, and sitting upon his grave drank
in the glorious thought that heaven is not
up among the stars, far away from mortal
men who walk the ways of earth, but
within us, around us, about us continually, its light guiding our footsteps,
and its harmonies soothing our sorrows,
if wve only open our eyes to behold the
light and our ears to drink in the entrancing sounds floating about us. Why
are not children taught this earlier? Why
do parents and teachers tell them of
heaven as something apart from earth
and the life they are to lead on earth,
until the babe of years is a semi-infidel,
thinking that heaven and the employments and habitudes which fit men to
enter heaven, are matters for grown-up
men and women, with which children
have nothing to do, and which they cannot, by any means, understand. Why
not tell the child, in its earliest years,
that it may live upon the earth and yet
breathe the atmosphere and realize much
of the joys of heaven-in fact, that it
may carry heaven in its heart whereever its footsteps wander. How this
knowledge would tend to restrain the
waywardness of childish folly; whereas,
heaven seems so distant and remote, to
the conception of children, that they
make no effort to gain it, having no hope
of obtaining it.
For myself, since that revelation to amy
spirit, made as I was sitting upon Goodwin's grave, I could never weep the loss
of friends. Those that go into the grave
are not lost to us, if we are mindful of
the heaven into which such have entered,
and upon the confines of which good
men are treading every day that they
live, and from which they are only detained by the fleshly prison-house which
checks the flight of the immortal spirit.
Sometimes the soul seems to loolr through
mysterious portals in its prison-house,
catching glimpses of the land of beauty,
and holding converse with the spirits
which have already effected their escape
and entered upon the career of immortality. In dreams of the night, familiar forms
flit before the eye closed to the entrance
of the light, but the sleepless spirit recognizes those forms as the beloved ones of
other years, and for the time the two
worlds, that which is and that which is
to come, seem to mnix and mingle like
sheets of flame or kindred waters of different streams, or rather like the dusky
shadows of the night and the light of the
dawning.
And at other seasons, as we sit musing
and dreaming the hours away, the grossness and film seem to drop away from
our eyes, like the scales from the eyes of
the blind man, and shadowy forms move
along noiselessly while we hush our
breathing to catch their footfalls and
listen to hear them speaking in the glad,
joyous tones of yore. And doubtless
they would come oftener, did we not
cherish a foolish dread of everything
supernatural, and turn shudderingly from
all ideas of contact and intercourse with
disembodied spirits. In mercy are they
restrained from visiting the abodes of
men, or rather, though they come and
go, watching around our steps andofttimes
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[OCTOBER