Unto man who goes through life working, weeping, laughing, loving, comes the heart believing unto immortality.  For reason oft the immortal hope burns low and the stars dim and disappear, but for the heart, never!  Scientists tell us matter is indestructible.  And the heart nourishes an immortal hope that no doubt can quench, no argument destroy, no misfortune annihilate.  Comforting, indeed, for reasons, the arguments of Socrates that life survives death.  After the death of his beloved daughter Tullia, Cicero outlined arguments which have consoled the mind of multitudes.  But in the hour of darkness and blackness, for a man to put out upon Death’s dark sea, upon the argument of Cicero, is like some Columbus committing himself to a single plank in the hope of discovering an unseen continent.

In these dark hours the heart speaks.  In the poet’s vision, to blind Homer, falling into the bog, torn by the thorns and thickets and lost in the forest and the night, came the young goddess, the daughter of Light and Beauty, to take the sightless poet by the hand and lead him up the heavenly heights.  Sometimes intellect seems sightless and wanders lost in the maze.  Then comes the heart to lead man along the upward path.  For even in its dreams the heart hears the sound of invisible music.  Oft before reason’s eye the heart unveils the Vision Splendid.  The soul is big with immortality.  When the heart speaks it is God within making overtures for man to come upward toward home and heaven.

RENOWN THROUGH SELF-RENUNCIATION.

“To live absolutely each man for himself could not be possible if all were to live together.  In course of time, in addition to utility, certain more sensitive individuals began to see a charm, a beauty in this consideration for others.  Gradually a sort of sanctity attached to it, and nature had once more illustrated her mysterious method of evolving from rough and even savage necessities her lovely shapes and her tender dreams.  To assert, then, with some recent critics of Christianity, that that law of brotherly love which is its central teaching is impracticable of application to the needs of society, is simply to deny the very first law by which society exists.”—­Richard Le Galliene, in “The Religion of a Literary Man.”

“It is only with renunciations that life, properly speaking, can be said to begin. . . .  In a valiant suffering for others, not in a slothful making others suffer for us, did nobleness ever lie.”—­Carlyle.

“You talk of self as the motive to exertion.  I tell you it is the abnegation of self which has wrought out all that is noble, all that is good, all that is useful, nearly all that is ornamental in the world.”—­Whyte Melville.

“Jesus said; ’Whosoever will come after Me, let him renounce himself, and take up his cross daily and follow Me.’  Perhaps there is no other maxim of Jesus which has such a combined stress of evidence for it and may be taken as so eminently His.”—­Matthew Arnold.