Francis Jacox

“ He pictures the chamber of death, while hushed and mournful gazers see also the summer sun in glory going down. “But it is only to us who remain that the evening darkness is growing, only for us that the sun is going down.” As the evening falls on us, but not on the departing believer; as the shadows deepen on us, but not on him; as the darkness gathers on us, but not on him; the “glorious promise has found its perfect fulfilment, that ‘at the evening-time there shall be light.’”
Secular literature has its analogous instances. ”

“ Not but that in some moods, and in some sense, this contemplative philosopher might have assented to the protest of Paul Flemming, that had we spiritual organs, to see and hear things now invisible and inaudible to us, we should behold the air thronged with the departing souls of that vast multitude which every moment dies. For, “truly the soul departs not alone on its last journey, but spirits of its kind attend it, when not ministering angels; and they go in families to the unknown land. Neither in life nor in death are we alone.” ”

“ It has been asked what would become of men, were their future absolutely foreknown by them: would they not become in imagination, and therefore in reality, the passive slaves of an inevitable fate, with all hope extinguished, all fear intensified, awaiting in terror the foreseen evil, and looking with indifference on the promised good, darkened as it would be by the shadow of intervening calamities, and stripped of the bright colouring of hope? ”

“ As we cannot be monarchs, says the Porpora of fiction, we are artists, and have a kingdom of our own: we dress ourselves as kings and great men, we ascend the stage, we seat ourselves upon a fictitious throne, we play a farce, we are actors. The world, he continues, sees us, but understands us not. “It is only when I am at the theatre that I see clearly our true relations to society. ”

“ For man is vanity, his days are as a shadow, saith the psalmist. And the preacher, whose text is vanity of vanities, all is vanity, finds vexation of spirit in meditations on man, all the days of whose vain life he spendeth as a shadow.
What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue! The exclamation was that of a great statesman, amid the excitement and the contests of public life, when there reached him news of the sudden death of a fellow-candidate and colleague. Shadow-hunted shadows. The pursued and the pursuers—the game and the sportsmen—shadows all. ”

“ Could the body of the whole earth, he goes on to say, or indeed the whole universe, be thus subjected to the examination of our senses, were it not too big and disproportioned for our inquiries, too unwieldy for the management of the eye and hand, “there is no question but it would appear to us as curious and well-contrived a frame as that of a human body. We should see the same concatenation and subserviency, the same necessity and usefulness, the same beauty and harmony, in all and every of its parts, as what we discover in the body of every single animal.” ”

“ Il y a en chacun de nous, writes Sainte-Beuve, un être primitif, idéal, que la nature a dessiné de sa main la plus maternelle, mais que l’homme trop souvent étoffe ou corrompt. Mr. Kingsley, in a touching reflection—literally reflection, looking back—on the “long lost might-have been,” adverts to that personal idea which every soul brings with it into the world, which shines dim and potential in the face of every sleeping babe, before it has been scarred, and distorted, and encrusted in the long tragedy of life. ”

“ How apt, at a bright banquet, is the thought of death to flash across the mind, is trite among the truisms of experience. It was at Belshazzar’s feast, while they drank wine out of the golden vessels of the temple, and praised the gods of gold, and of silver, of brass, of iron, of wood, and of stone, when the revelry was at its height and the revellers at their best, that in the same hour there came forth fingers of a man’s hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaster of the wall of the king’s palace ”

“ The Chinese have been pointed to, by a moral philosopher, to point his moral, which is, the desolating tendency of secularism—they having learnt practically, as well as theoretically, to think of themselves as mere transitory beings, who have no future life to expect, and no present Providence to reverence or fear; and the result he takes to be, that they are the meanest, the most deceitful, and one of the most vicious nations in the world—a people who literally sit in darkness, and whose lives are passed in the shadow of death. ”

“ If ’tis double death to die in sight of shore, as Shakspeare says, it is also, or nearly, double death to die in the dark. Some would almost say, Surely the bitterness of death is past, if light be vouchsafed to the dying, and so the shadows flee away. Well can they understand a pregnant symbolism in that incident of patriarchal days, when a deep sleep fell upon Abram as the sun was going down; and, lo, a horror of a great darkness fell upon him. ”

“ Carlyle elsewhere applies to our own revolution times, in the century before: “Such is the drama of life, seen in Baillie of Kilwinning; a thing of multifarious tragic and epic meanings, then as now. A many-voiced tragedy and epos, yet with broad-based comic and grotesque accompaniments, done by actors not in buskins;—ever replete with elements of guilt and remorse, of pity, instruction, and fear.”
Act well your part:—there all the moral lies. Though the world be histrionical, and most men live ironically, says Sir Thomas Browne, “yet be thou what thou singly art, and personate only thyself.” ”

“ We like our churches to be beautiful, and our temples, and our whole symbolic creations, Mr. Hannay somewhere observes; their beauty represents the general beauty of the universe, and that is one of the modes by which God is pleased to appeal to our faculties of love and wonder and admiration. “The Romanists call the Virgin Mary a ‘mystical rose,’ and a beautiful woman is a mystical rose; attractive, and yet, at the same time, a religious symbol—an object which keeps alive in you the sense of wonder and love of beauty, and thankfulness to the Supreme for the glories of His creation.” ”

“ More wonderful than even the Atlantic cable is declared to be that unknown fibre, along which, from other men’s sins, responsibility may thrill even to our departed souls: “a chain whose links are formed perhaps of idle words, of forgotten looks, of phrases of double meaning, of bad advice, of cynical sentiment hardly seriously meant; yet carried on through life after life, through soul after soul, [3] till the little seed of evil sown by you has developed into some deed of guilt at which you shudder, but from participation in responsibility for which you cannot clear yourself.” ”

“ The baffled prince, cut to the heart, can but exclaim, “He dies, and makes no sign: O God, forgive him!” Warwick again interposes a harsher voice, “So bad a death argues a monstrous life,” he is sure. But his sovereign hushes his damning criticism with a right royal veto:—
“Forbear to judge, for we are sinners all.
...
Close up his eyes, and draw the curtain close;
And let us all to meditation.”
Forbear to judge. And the Shakspearean Henry practises in person the monition thus enforced. It is his rule to check in himself every tendency to uncharitable judgment. ”

“ But, as he goes on to say, between the awful blank of total privation of vision, and the temporary blank of vision merely veiled, there lies the widest difference. “In the moment of their restoration the blind have but one glimpse of light, flashing on them in an overpowering gleam of brightness, which the thickest, closest veiling cannot extinguish. The new darkness is not like the void darkness of old: it is filled with rapid, changing visions of brilliant colours and ever-varying forms, rising, falling, whirling hither and thither with every second.” ”

“ It was at a time of national and household tribulation, when darkness that might be felt seemed to encompass altar and hearth, that Joseph de Maistre wrote to a friend in trouble: “Be it enough for us to know, that for everything there is a reason with which we shall one day become acquainted; let us not weary ourselves with seeking out the why and the wherefore, even when possibly they might be discerned.” ”

“ But where, asks a prose writer of genius, where, in the sharp lineaments of rigid and unsightly death, is the calm beauty of slumber, telling of rest for the waking hours that are past, and gentle hopes and loves for those which are to come? “Lay death and sleep down, side by side, and say who shall find the two akin.” But this is selecting such an aspect of mortality as comes not within the poet’s purview. ”

“ Insomuch that it became a proverb, “Is Saul also among the prophets?” No prophet is accepted in his own country; that is become a proverb too. And as with Saul, a young man among the prophets, so with youthful David among the men of war from their youth. Eliab, his eldest brother, knew, as he thought, the pride and the naughtiness of his heart in coming down to the camp to see the battle; but he knew not what sterling stuff there was in the stripling. Why had Jesse’s youngest son come down hither? and with whom had he left those few sheep in the wilderness? ”

“ Tasks as futile does earth to its denizens give.”
When we reflect on the shortness and uncertainty of life, how despicable, exclaims David Hume, seem all our pursuits of happiness! And even if we would extend our concern beyond our own life, he goes on to say, how frivolous appear our most enlarged and most generous projects, when we consider the incessant changes and revolutions of human affairs, by which [181] laws and learning, books and governments, are hurried away by time, as by a rapid stream, and are lost in the immense ocean of matter. ”

“ Every sin, we are in fine reminded, may waken its echo; every sin is reduplicated and reiterated in other souls and lives.
A distinguished French preacher, of the Reformed faith, has a striking discourse on what he entitles the solidarity of evil; and he too dilates upon the mysterious links which connect together persons and acts that appear to have nothing in common,—suggesting melancholy examples of the contagion of guilt and its consequences, of the expansive power of corruption and its almost boundless results. ”