The Receding Years ⁽¹⁾
A Letter from B M Palmer

We were all startled some days since by the account of a cyclone, given in our papers, which passed over your beautiful city and wrought such damage. Of course, the statements were exceedingly general, with no names given of the sufferers; and we take heart in hoping that you and yours escaped all injury. This hope deepens almost into conviction, as several days have since elapsed during which the news must have travelled to us, if serious injury had happened to any of you. Still I write a brief line, if only to indicate how much your sister and yourself, with the families of both, have dwelt upon our hearts since the dread catastrophe. You may be assured that no lapse of time can dim our remembrance of you both, or weaken our affection. The memory of your dear father abides with me among the consecrated associations of the past; and with him is the living remembrance of all who perpetuate his name on earth.

Doubtless you are not old enough to take in the singular fact that, as we draw near the close of life here, the receding years roll together as the world we look at through a telescope - very much as by Christian faith we contemplate the eternal future which is before us. How sacred it becomes, as an unchangeable inheritance which is ours by the power of memory - and of memory illuminated with the brightness of human affection! The living flit before our eyes, subject to change or forgetfulness: so many things occur to wreck the friendships we cherish, that we know not which will endure. But death comes with his sanctifying touch: and paradoxical as it may appear, those whom we call our dead are more truly the living than when they breathed and moved around us. I daily wonder at these spiritual, experimental and therefore individual proofs afforded us of the soul's immortality, of the resurrection of the dead, and of certain and eternal existence in the great hereafter. This mortal life is indeed beautiful, sweet, sometimes awful and grand - but it is all this, as it foreshadows the blessed life of immortality which is beyond - where we shall go up. . . .

1. Written by the noted minister of New Orleans on 26 August 1890 to a Mrs Grace Lea Hunt, obviously a Christian friend, in Pennsylvania; reprinted from his Life and Letters. For comment on the disaster which has now struck New Orleans, see p 315.