"
"As a babe?"
"Oh, yes. As a darling babe, pure, and beautiful as a cherub."
"But would you have him linger in babyhood forever?" asked the
friend.
The mother did not reply.
"Did you expect him always to remain a child here? Would perpetual
infancy have satisfied your maternal heart? Had you not already
begun to look forward to the period when intellectual manhood would
come with its crowning honors?"
"It is true," sighed the mother.
"As it would have been here, so will it be there. Here, the growth
of his body would have been parallel, if I may so speak, with the
growth of his mind. The natural and the visible would have developed
in harmony with the spiritual and the invisible. Your child would
have grown to manhood intellectually, as well as bodily. And you
would not have had it otherwise. Growth--development--the going on
to perfection, are the laws of life; and more emphatically so as
appertaining to the life of the human soul. That life, in all its
high activities, burns still in the soul of your lost darling, and
he will grow, in the world of angelic spirits to which our Father
has removed him, up to the full stature of an angel, a glorified
form of intelligence and wisdom. He cannot linger in feeble
babyhood; in the innocence of simple ignorance; but must advance
with the heavenly cycles of changing and renewing states."
"And this is all the comfort you bring to my yearning heart?" said
the mother.
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