627 TREMONT STREET, BOSTON, December 25, 1881.
MY DEAR FRIEND,--Alone in my room this evening, I feel just like writing a Christmas letter to you, and I follow the impulse.
This day always brings back old times and old friends to memory, but never with sadness to me, because the one idea of the day is hope and joy for all souls, the possibilities of infinite help, unending progress. Whenever I enter deeply into the thought of Christ, whenever I feel Him the one Reality inseparable from my own being, then I feel that I have my friends safe, and that they are to be my friends forever. To me, He is the one Divine Friend in whom human friendships can alone be real and permanent, because He draws us into sympathy with what is best, with what is eternal, the love of goodness, the consciousness of God in us and around us, and the solemn gladness of a human life into which God has entered, and where He still is.
God with us still, the Spiritual Presence of One who is more real than any other person can be to us, through whom indeed we receive our personality,--this idea, so grand as at times to seem almost impossible, grows more definite and clear to me. It is the “So I am with you alway” of Christ. And with this idea, that of those whom we love unseen, our friends who have disappeared from sight, becomes more definite also.
Sometimes I can say undoubtingly, “I _know_ I shall find them again, where He is.” But though the light flickers and dims sometimes, what if it does? There the light is, and every year a larger space is redeemed from darkness.
Oh, my dear friend! life is a gift blessed as it is awful. To think how close we are to one another for good or evil, do what we will! We cannot be apart from our fellow-beings; the pulses of this life we have in common throb, upward or downward, through us forever. Death is not to me half so solemn as life: but then death is no reality--a circumstance of our external life only....
627 TREMONT STREET, BOSTON, June 6, 1881.
... I am steadily gaining in strength I think, and I am glad to keep on learning to live and to work, with such limitations as years necessarily bring. I find my life taking deeper hold of all other human lives; I feel myself more closely and warmly one of the great human family, every year of my life. And I feel through this the assurance of immortality--because we are in our deepest instincts children of the living God--because we, as sons and daughters, are united through the Son with the Father; we share His eternity; we cannot lose Him nor one another, nor the least spark of truth or love kindled within us from His being.