Faith which feeds on personal love must at last prevail over it. If
Faith has any virtue it must have it here when we find ourselves bereft
and isolated, facing a world from which the light has fled leaving it
bleak and strange. We live for experience and the race; these individual
interludes are just helps to that; the warm inn in which we lovers met
and refreshed was but a halt on a journey. When we have loved to the
intensest point we have done our best with each other. To keep to that
image of the inn, we must not sit overlong at our wine beside the fire.
We must go on to new experiences and new adventures. Death comes to part
us and turn us out and set us on the road again.
But the dead stay where we leave them.
I suppose that is the real good in death, that they do stay; that it
makes them immortal for us. Living they were mortal. But now they can
never spoil themselves or be spoilt by change again. They have
finished--for us indeed just as much as themselves. There they sit for
ever, rounded off and bright and done. Beside these clear and certain
memories I have of my dead, my impressions of the living are vague
provisional things.
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