Spiritual Teething
Milk for babes; but, when they come to the age for meat of doctrine, teeth
must be cut. It is harder work for souls than for bodies; but the
processes are wonderfully parallel,--the results too, alas! If clergymen
knew the symptoms of spiritual disease and death, as well as doctors do of
disease and death of the flesh, and if the lists were published at end of
each year and month and week, what a record would be shown! "Mortality in
Brooklyn, or New York, or Philadelphia for the week ending July 7th." We
are so used to the curt heading of the little paragraph that our eye
glances idly away from it, and we do not realize its sadness. By tens and
by scores they have gone,--the men, the women, the babies; in hundreds new
mourners are going about the streets, week by week. We are as familiar
with black as with scarlet, with the hearse as with the pleasure-carriage;
and yet "so dies in human hearts the thought of death" that we can be
merry.
But, if we knew as well the record of sick and dying and dead souls, our
hearts would break.
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