Afterlife

“ So that the dead wished to live again; seeing that there was no rest in the tomb.
And the gold-born days died in golden fire;—and the moon whitened nightly the face of the earth; and the perfume of the summer passed away like a breath of incense;—but the dead in the sepulchre could not wholly die.
The voices of life entered his resting-place; the murmur of the world spoke to him in the darkness; the winds of the sea called to him through the crannies of the tomb. So that he could not rest. And yet for the dead there is no consolation of tears! ”

“ We believe that the dead will again arise—that in some other state we shall again meet with them; and yet there are those who make their remains a source of profit. Perchance, the Angel of Death holds his court beyond the grave, and they may be summoned before him to account for their deeds. We, in our boyish days, were taught{276} to take off our hats when we entered a churchyard, and to walk amongst the dead as reverentially as we did up the aisle of the church—to look upon the grave as the gate which opened into heaven, as the only road which leads to the realms of eternal happiness. ”

“ The spiritual death is that which shall be passed upon the wicked when he shall say unto them, "Depart, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the Devil and his angels." You can read this revelation in the Book of Doctrine and Covenants when you go home.
I understand that that second death is a spiritual death. Is it meant that the spirit shall die? Each of you can draw your own conclusions as well as I. Your traditions may be such that your thoughts do not run in the same channel with mine in this respect. But I can conceive of no other spiritual death than dissolution. ”

“ Is there no life beyond the grave? Is the spirit which held such communion with thine for ever quenched?
Can the grave contain for ever the immortal part? Look up, oh! mourning one; thy loved one is not there.
Hark! hearest thou not soft, heavenly voices, whispering sweetly of a life beyond the dark river, where Death can never come; of glorious mansions where is peace and joy for ever more, and of another freed spirit welcomed to the blissful home? Dost thou not feel upon thy tear-moistened cheek, gentle wavings of angel wings perfumed with the breath of heavenly flowers? ”

“ Know that when the time of your death has arrived, those most dear, will be the first to thrust you out. And what will be your real home? A grave will be the home of your body until the day of judgment; and your soul will have to go to its long home, either to paradise or to hell. ”

“ But probably, in most cases, the change from mortal to immortality is no greater, comparatively speaking, than when a child emerges into this world. We shall suffer no more in putting off this flesh and leaving the spirit houseless than the child, in its capacity, does in its first efforts to breathe the breath of this mortal life.
After the spirit leaves the body, it remains without a tabernacle in the spirit-world until the Lord, by his law that he has ordained, brings to pass the resurrection of the dead. ”

“ Till I provided death: so death becomes
His final remedy; and, after life,
Tried in sharp tribulation, and refined
By faith and faithful works, to second life,
Waked in the renovation of the just,
Resigns him up with Heaven and Earth renewed.
But let us call to synod all the Blest,
Through Heaven’s wide bounds: from them I will not hide
My judgements; how with mankind I proceed,
As how with peccant Angels late they saw,
And in their state, though firm, stood more confirmed. ”

“ Do the dead return? Are the dead indeed dead? You have nailed down the coffin-lid; you have seen the coffin as it sunk into the grave; you have heard the rattling of the clod,—but is that all? Is the beloved one whom you have given to the grave, indeed dead, or only more truly living in a new body, formed of refined matter, invisible to our gross organs? Is that which we call soul, only the result of a particular organization of gross matter, or is it the real, eternal substance of which all other matter is but the servant and the expression? Do the dead return? ”

“ This bit of sphagnum shows the process in miniature: stage after stage of dying has been gone through, and each has been all the while crowned with life. Each time that the crown has sunk down again into death, that death has again been crowned in the act of dying: and the life all the time is the apparent thing: the daily dying that underlies it is out of sight to the passing glance.
Yes, life is the uppermost, resurrection life, radiant and joyful and strong, for we represent down here Him who liveth and was dead and is alive for evermore. ”

“ Neither wilt thou suffer thy holy one to see corruption. Thou wilt show me the path of life: In thy presence is fulness of joy; In thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore”; Is. 26:19—“Thy dead shalt live; my dead bodies shall arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust; for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast forth the dead”; Ez. 37:1-14—the valley of dry bones—“I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, O my people”—a prophecy of restoration based upon the idea of immortality and resurrection ”

“ The symbol shockingly perverted from its original beautiful meaning by the mistaken belief that we sleep in our graves until a distant resurrection day is often applied to burial grounds. Let its appropriate significance be restored. Life is the field, death the reaper, another sphere of being the immediate garner. An enlightened Christian, instead of entitling a graveyard the garden of the dead, and looking for its long buried forms to spring from its cold embrace, will hear the angel saying again, "They are not here: they are risen." ”

“ Replied the Dead; "the shadow of a shade;
Death can retain no spirit!—woe and bliss,
And heaven and hell, are for the living made;
An instant flits between life's latest sigh
And life's renewal;—that it is to die! ”

“ Time rolls by, and against the door of the mausoleum where we buried our dead out of sight the years have piled events and emotions and distractions, and the passion which we once thought immortal becomes now an episode, and by and by a dream, and at last a vague and shadowy remembrance, and one day some new and mighty fact stalks forward, and sweeps away all obstructions, and the doors of the tomb are reopened, and the dead of our heart come forth, bringing to us sometimes the joys of life’s morning, and sometimes the bitterness of a new death. ”

“ You may talk and talk to the grief-stricken one who bends over the corpse in the coffin about death being a transition from a world of woe to a world of weal, and the distressed one may try to cherish the thought and proclaim belief, but the tears cease not to flow, the pain and anguish written upon every feature of the mourner refuse to give place to joy and gladness. ”

“ Death was symbolized in the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil—in the day thou eatest of it, thou shalt surely die—hence the Tree of Death. Death we learn from other scriptures than Genesis, is both temporal and spiritual. What is here called temporal death is physical death, separation of spirit and body, the dust returning to the earth whence it came; but the spirit, being as we have seen a thing immortal, survives in conscious life and goes to the world of spirits. ”

“ We have sinned, we know it, and this place is death and Hell."
"Death comes," the voice pealed, "and death is not a dream or a forgetting. Death is real. But I, too, am real, and whom I will I save. I see the scheme of things, and in it no place for me, the brain and the body against me. ”

“ Suppose you were now in ignorance respecting the doctrine of life and immortality through a resurrection. You know you must die, and sincerely think that death will terminate your existence forever. You see your children one after another laid upon their dying bed, and with distraction shake the farewell hand of eternal separation, and with the most solemn melancholy and wo, look forward to the period when you must follow them down to the chambers of eternal silence, and cease to be. ”

“ We are dying: the earth hath already wrapped itself in its winding-sheet of snow, to foretell to us the time when, stiff and cold, we shall be dressed for the grave. We are all dying. Are you young? Well, the young are dying. Life is but a lingering death. As soon as we are born, we began to draw to our end. Every path in life leads straight to the grave. ”

“ But we know that the dead body has no power to hear the voice of the Son of God; and with equal certainty we may know that the dead body will never come forth from the grave. But let us read these passages as referring to the resurrection of the spirit, from the dark and gloomy grave of spiritual death, to a life of heavenly love and truth, and we see at once the truth, beauty and harmony of our Lord's words. ”

“ For how can they be after death if they be in death, especially when we do not even call them dying, as we call those in sleep, sleeping; and those in languor, languishing; and those in grief, grieving; and those in life, living? And yet the dead, until they rise again, are said to be in death, but cannot be called dying. ”

“ I have dreamed of Death:--what will it be to die Not in a dream, but in the literal truth With all Death's adjuncts ghastly and uncouth, The pang that is the last and the last sigh? Too dulled, it may be, for a last good-bye, Too comfortless for any one to soothe, A helpless charmless spectacle of ruth Through long last hours, so long while yet they fly. ”

“ When death breaks the dark lantern, yet it does not extinguish the candle that was pent up in it. (2.) The reuniting of the soul and body at the resurrection. The soul is often put for the life; that indeed falls under the power of the grave for a time, but it shall, at length, be redeemed from it, when mortality shall be swallowed up of life. ”

“ And if death hath stretched out the absence into the dim arms of eternity—and removed the distance away into that bourne from which no traveller returns—the absence and the distance of her on whose forehead once hung the relic we adore—what heart may abide the beauty of the ghost that doth sometimes at midnight appear at our sleepless bed, and with pale uplifted arms waft over us at once a blessing and a farewell! ”

“ Have you ever shot in imagination the dreadful gulf that stands fixed between life and death, and between time and eternity? Have you ever tried to get a glimpse beforehand of your own place where you will be an hour after your death, when they are putting the grave-clothes on your still warm body, and when they are measuring your corpse for your coffin? ”

“ Upon death’s purple altar now,
See where the victor-victim bleeds:
Your heads must come
To the cold tomb:—
Only the actions of the just
Smell sweet, and blossom in their dust. THE COMMON HERITAGE.
There is no death: what seems so is transition:
This life of mortal breath
Is but a suburb of the life elysian
Whose portal we call Death.—Longfellow. There is—says the author of Euthanasy—no universal night in this earth, and for us in the universe there is no death. What to us here is night coming on, is, on the other side of the earth, night ending, and day begun. ”

“ THE INFLUENCE OF THE DEAD.
Who are the Spirits watching by the dead?
Faith, from whose eyes a solemn light is shed;
And Hope, with far-off sunshine on the head.
The influence of the dead is that of Heaven ”

“ For a long time past I had been convinced that death is the end of everything for man, and I now thought that even if he survived death, it would be neither natural nor fitting for him to come back to the place where his body had been subjected to the undignified rites of cremation, in order to kick and roll his own skull about. ”

“ The pious tones which once with a holy inspiration had gushed from the pure fount of his soul—tones to which he had himself listened in silent devotion but a few weeks before,—resounded now in mourning over his grave; and sad and sorrowful, though at the same time sweetly consolatory, still echo far and wide to the hearts of all:
“Blessed are the dead, who die in the Lord, now and for ever. ”

“ To their simple minds the spirits of the dead dwell all about them in the rocky gorges, the barren plains, the wooded dells, the rustling trees, the still waters of their native land, haunting in death the very spots where they last entered into their mothers' wombs to be born, and where in future they will again enter into the wombs of other women to be born again as other children into the world. ”

“ Whenever it came, a heavy, numbing throb seemed to take hold of my heart, and say, 'Dead-dead-dead.' And I cried out, 'The living, the living shall praise Thee, O God; the dead cannot praise thee. There is no work in the grave; in the night no man can work. ”

“ Thou wilt have helped my soul from Death
The second Death, that never dies,
That cannot die, when time is dead:
Live Death, wherein the lost soul cries,
Eternally uncomforted.
Dark Angel, with thine aching lust! ”

“ After the sacrifice they all cry again, smear their bodies and faces all over with ashes, and wear cords round their necks for a hundred days in token that they are not eating good food.581 They imagine that as soon as the soul quits the body at death, it mounts into a tree where there is a bird's nest fern, and sitting there among the fronds it laughs and mocks at the people who are crying and making great lamentations over his deserted tabernacle. ”

“ But death of horror is despoiled,
When Heaven shines forth beyond the tomb.
For ever gone! oh, dreadful fate!
Go visit nature—gather thence
The symbols of man's happier state,
Which speak to every mortal sense. ”