No Light Beyond the Tomb by VERA CHILTON

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Aug 6, 1914

No Light Beyond the Tomb

By VERA CHILTON

VERA CHILTON

It seemed only a heap of bedding, away in a dark corner.

I came out of the bright sunshine into the dark, close, inner veranda, and began to give my lesson. My pupil (the wife of a nawab) was not bright, owing to continued ill health, and the lesson had to be made simple. It finished, as my lessons so often do, with an account of the blessed hope of a soon-coming Saviour.

Then it was that I noticed a movement under the bedding in that dark corner, and a feeble but eager voice cried out, “Miss Sahib, tell me, will he come soon?”

I gave a reason for this hope that is within us, and he said, “O Miss Sahib! shall I see her again? shall I see my wife?” I can only give you the words, it is impossible to depict the deep agony of tone; eagerness and despair were blended.

It is in circumstances like this that the heart of the worker for Mohammedans is pierced with unutterable anguish; for what answer can be given? He was an old, old man. He had loved his wife dearly, and now she had just died, and he was lying on the earth mourning for her, and could find no comfort. He was a Mohammedan, and had no beautiful hope of a blessed reunion where there shall be no more parting, for Mohammedans do not believe there will even be recognition.

This woman had evidently lived a Mohammedan and died a Mohammedan, and all I could do for the poor, stricken mourner was to point him to a living, personal Saviour who loved him and died for him and was longing to save him. But this, alas! was not what that hungering human heart craved; in its weakness it yearned for that which to it, perhaps, was the only love it had ever known. The eye that had momentarily brightened, grew dull again, and with a long, quivering, gasping groan of, “O wife! wife!” the trembling form grew still with the silence of a terrible despair.

O you whom God has made to be one flesh and bound together with tenderest cords of a holy union, you who, even in the mysterious hour of death-parting, can look hopefully forward to an eternal union where parting is unknown, can you realize that hundreds of these “hopeless” separations through death are taking place every week? O, would that this cry of despairing anguish might rend your hearts as it did mine for many nights after, and stir you up to untold effort before it is too late, that many of these souls that sit in darkness and the “shadow of death” might be brought to the light, and saved the agony of sorrowing “as others which have no hope.”

1 Thess. 4: 13.

Lucknow, India.