BENEFIT OF BEREAVEMENT.
By Phillips Brooks
TAKE the man whose life has known bereavement, who has passed some time through those days and nights which I may not try to describe to you, but which come up to so many of you as I say the old word, “death”—days and nights when he watched the slow untwisting of some silver cord on which his very life was hung, or suddenly felt the golden bowl dashed down and broken of which his very life had drank. The first shock became dulled. The first agony grew calm. The lips subsided into serenity. But was there not something in him that made him greater and purer and richer than of old; something that let any one see, who watched the change, that it was “better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all”? A whole new quality, that rich quality which the Bible calls by its large word “patience,” the power of his trial, was in his new serenity until he died.—Phillips Brooks.