Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 254, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 November 1917 — DUTY OF PRESENT MINISTRY [ARTICLE]

DUTY OF PRESENT MINISTRY

Better Than Ait the Post-Mortem Teatimonials and Devotion We Can Bestow. Do not keep your sublime love and tenderness sealed up until your friends are dead. Fill their lives with sweetness; speak approving, cheering words while their ears can hear them, and while their hearts can be thrilled and be made happier by them. The kind things you mean to do when they are gone, do before they go. The flowers you mean to send for their coffins, send to brighten and sweeten their homes before they leave them. If my friends have alabaster boxes laid’ away full of fragrant perfumes of sympathy and affection which they intend rather they would bring them out in my weary and troubled hours and open them thiri“may berefrestiedand Cheered by them while I need them. I would rather have a plain coffin without flowers, a funeral without a eulogy, than life without sweetness of love and sympathy. Let us learn to anoint mortem kindness does not cheer the burdened spirit; flowers on a coffin cast no fragrance backward over the weary way.—Selected.