CHAPTER I. SOME INTRODUCTORY WORDS. THAT the subject now to be discussed is one of the most absorbing interest and the deepest importance goes without saying. There is no one of us who is not concerned with it. The youngest child has a stake in the heavenly country, and so has the oldest saint. For, first of all, most of us have friends in heaven-friends of whom we cannot help frequently thinking, picturing their condition and fancying how they are employed. How often the bereaved husband thinks of his lost wife! How vividly he remembers the night she left him weeping by the side of her corpse in that never-to-be-forgotten still still death-chamber! Can he ever forget that woful day when he laid that dear corpse in the grave, where he expects by and by to lie beside it? How often he wonders what she is doing now,-she, her real self, and where, precisely, has she gone! And the mother thinks of her child, snatched so rudely and, as she thought at the time, so cruelly, from her arms by death,thinks of her stretched out in that tiny coffin, shut up in that lonely little grave. Where is she? The body is in the dust. Where is the soul, the child itself? So with us all. We cannot but have many a thought of our departed, of our fathers and mothers, our sisters and brothers, and our children, who have gone before us through the Valley of the Shadow, and wistfully and wonderingly we must inquire of them in our hearts. Those who have friends across the ocean in Australia or America do not forget them; which of us can forget the friends who are beyond the wider ocean which separates the heavenly shore from this? you say, "Yes, talk to me of heaven; I love To hear about the home above, For there doth many a dear one dwell So |