Death is but a passage. It is not a house, it is only a vestibule. The grave has a door on its inner side.
Interpretation
Death is a transition rather than an end; it leads to another existence.
This quote by Alexander Maclaren suggests that death should not be viewed as a final destination or a permanent state. Instead, it is depicted as a transition or passage, similar to how a vestibule serves as a transitional space leading into a larger area. The metaphor of the grave having a door indicates that there is more beyond death, inviting contemplation of what lies after life.
In practice
In a eulogy, to remind attendees that death is not the end.
Did any of you, parents, ever hear your child wake from sleep with some panic fear and shriek the mother's name through the darkness? Was not that a more powerful appeal than all words? And, depend upon it, that the soul which cries aloud on God, "the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ," though it have "no language but a cry," will never call in vain.
Do not let the empty cup be your first teacher of the blessings you had when it was full. Do not let a bard place here and there in the bed destroy your rest. Seek, as a plain duty, to cultivate a buoyant, joyous sense of the crowded kindnesses of God in your daily life.
Every life has dark tracts and long stretches of somber tint, and no representation is true to fact which dips its pencil only in light, and flings no shadows on the canvas.
In making our decisions, we must use the brains that God has given us. But we must also use our hearts which He also gave us. A man who has not learned to say, No -who is not resolved that he will take God's way, in spite of every dog that can bay or bark at him, in spite of every silvery choice that woos him aside-will be a weak and a wretched man till he dies.
If you would win the world, melt it, do not hammer it.
Strange - is it not? That of the myriads who Before us passed the door of Darkness through, Not one returns to tell us of the road Which to discover we must travel too.
The Christians are right: it is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began.
I suffer from life and from other people. I canβt look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful β only then do I find myself and feel comforted.
Mission arises from the heart of God Himself and is communicated from His heart to ours. Mission is the global outreach of the global people of a global God.
The end of the First World War had thrown Germany's youth into great turmoil. The reins of power had fallen from the hands of a deeply disillusioned older generation, and the younger ones drew together in larger and smaller groups to blaze new paths or, at least, to discover a new star to steer by.
Good nature will always supply the absence of beauty; but beauty cannot supply the absence of good nature.
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