Life has been lent to us, and we owe it to our traveling
companions to let them see what use we make of it to the end. We must
show our brethren both how to live and how to die. These first summonses
of illness have besides a divine value; they give us glimpses behind the
scenes of life; they teach us something of its awful reality and its
inevitable end. They teach us sympathy. They warn us to redeem the time
while it is yet day. They awaken in us gratitude for the blessings which
are still ours, and humility for the gifts which are in us. So that,
evils though they seem, they are really an appeal to us from on high, a
touch of God's fatherly scourge.
How frail a thing is health, and what a thin envelope protects our life
against being swallowed up from without, or disorganized from within! A
breath, and the boat springs a leak or founders; a nothing, and all is
endangered; a passing cloud, and all is darkness! Life is indeed a
flower which a morning withers and the beat of a passing wing breaks
down; it is the widow's lamp, which the slightest blast of air
extinguishes. In order to realize the poetry which clings to morning
roses, one needs to have just escaped from the claws of that vulture
which we call illness. The foundation and the heightening of all things
is the graveyard.
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