Excerpt from A Sermon Delivered at Plymouth, at the Funeral of Rev. James Kendall, D.D., Senior Minister of the First Church: In Plymouth, Sunday Afternoon, March 20, 1859 The Christian mind sees a prophetic meaning, a holy beauty, in the ministry of death, in whatever period of life it may come. When the innocent or the faithful are called away, the angel of death is always a messenger of light, as well as of gloom. It is so even when the youngest die. Parental affection is smitten with peculiar grief when the budding beauty of the infant's life is blasfed, and the lovely form, whose every motion was a spell to enchant the heart, is laid low in an apparently untimely grave. The mother to-day, like the mother in Rama, weeps for her child, and almost refuses to be comforted, when it is thus early gone. It is right that she should weep. Yet, in calmer hours, she begins to see that the departure of these little ones not only illumines the dark valley, but becomes a peculiar revelation of the immortality beyond it. The soul which had scarcely begun to develop its powers in the gardens of human love, istransplanted into the garden of God, to unfold amid a heavenly beauty. It fades not into death, but into a higher life. And, at length, when faith has hidden the waves of grief be still, even the mother's heart hears the words, Suffer little children to come unto me, Of such is the kingdom of heaven, as if chanted by angelic voices around that little tomb, until her tears cease to flow, and she feels herself drawn up towards the heavens by the yeamings of human affec tion, and the inspiration of immortal hopes. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.