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.
I like to question cultural biases wherever I go, and I question Islamophobia as much as I question anti-western sentiment because I think all extremist ideologies are very similar.
If you blame others for something that happens in your life, then you must wait until they change in order to get better.
The end of a melody is not its goal; but nonetheless, if the melody had not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable.
The most consequential change in man's view of the world, of living nature and of himself came with the introduction, over a period of some 100 years beginning only in the 18th century, of the idea of change itself, of change over periods of time: in a word, of evolution.
War is not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means.
Among human beings there is no greater banality than death. Second in order, because it is possible to die without being born, comes birth, and next comes marriage.
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