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.
Resolved ... that it would be a dangerous delusion were a confidence in the men of our choice to silence our fears for the safety of our rights: that confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism - free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence.
We all have known good critics, who have stamped out poet's hopes; Good statesmen, who pulled ruin on the state; Good patriots, who, for a theory, risked a cause; Good kings, who disemboweled for a tax; Good Popes, who brought all good to jeopardy; Good Christians, who sat still in easy-chairs; And damned the general world for standing up. Now, may the good God pardon all good men!
You grieve Not that heaven does not exist but That it exists without us
Forgotten were the elementary rules of logic, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
One may not reach the dawn save by the path of the night.
We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.