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.
Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and a heretic
There may be a time when a country will have to wake up from a vision of happiness, when they have to realize that theirs is not the perfect idea, that there are many aspects that do not correspond to the reality of what is there, the real need and aspirations of the people.
The dream might have been more than a dream. It was as if a door in the wall of reality had come ajar... and now all sorts of unwelcome things were flying through.
I thought when I became a Christian I had nothing to do but just to lay my oars in the bottom of the boat and float along. But I soon found that I would have to go against the current.
We need not be theologians to see that we have shifted responsibility for making the world interesting from God to the newspaperman.
In the space which thought creates around itself there is no love. This space divides man from man, and in it is all the becoming, the battle of life, the agony and fear. Meditation is the ending of this space, the ending of the me.
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