No food so sweet as that which the mother's hand prepares; no place so lordly as that which the father provided for his children; no blossoms of the garden so fragrant as the thyme, and the rose, and the lilac which the mother's hand hath planted.

This is the ideal image which remains with you through youth and manhood. It goes to college hall or place of business, and to preserve that memory sacred the whole of civilization would rise up in arms of defense. For this image kings, princes, potentates have been robbed of their power, falsely earned, that you might keep alive this picture.

Death is greater than kings, mightier than warriors, stronger than the priestly hand. No papal power shall be able to pronounce judgment against Death, and no march of civilization, however great and powerful, can ward off the Silent Messenger. But Death has no power over that picture; that living image is still preserved, and transferred from the changefulness of time, from the decay of creaking timbers and mouldering walls, to the world of spirits, and perpetuated there.

On earth the mother sits sometimes alone, with her darlings far away, as the eagle might sit in the deserted nest. One is far out upon the ocean, one is in distant lands seeking for wealth, another is in legislative halls in pursuit of fame or the country's weal, another is in the busy mart pursuing the god of gain, and another, alas ! may be in some shadow of sin or shame. But her heart holds the little group as faithfully as when they clambered around her knee.

In the life of the spirit, these wandering ones are gathered together. There can be no separation by distant lands or continents, and that love that can bridge over the space between her heart and the dungeon cell, can bring her wandering children back to the threshold of home.

Doubt it not, or you must doubt that light and love and truth are endless. If home is destroyed on earth in its physical aspect by time or change; if ruinous armies and the desolation of want and poverty wage aggressive warfare over its fair domain - in the life of the spirit there is no such desolation. There can be only one war, and that is hatred, that can destroy the home of the spirit. There can be only one depraved condition, and that is selfishness, that can destroy its fair and wondrous harmony. And in the light of the spirit, where you see as you are seen, and know as you are known; where you no longer gaze through a glass darkly, but face to face, the diviner affections spring to the rescue, and the selfishness that encompasses you here, and robs you oftentimes of the sweetest flower of love, there is obliterated in the rarer light of the spiritual kingdom. In spirit life those who are inviolably separated by lack of sympathy do not meet in the household; but many meet who are disconnected here, whose lines of life there are made beautiful by the added light of the spirit.

Think what death does to you here. The memory of the departed becomes sacred; all their faults sink into the light of the Eternal presence, and you remember at last only their virtues.

In the light of the spiritual kingdom, those who are divided here come ashamed into their Father's dwelling, reuniting the ties of old. Those who have been separated by foolish pride, ambition or anger, see face to face, and no longer through a glass darkly, and enter again the kingdom of love. And many between whom the wall of suspicion and disaffection has imperceptibly risen, awaken to find themselves mistaken; that it was only the outward man or woman that divided them, while in the realm of the spirit all is made plain.

Most differences in human life are the result of misunderstanding; most quarrels are the result of blindness. When the real heaven is opened you cannot misjudge one another; you leap this wall of seeming difficulty and seeming offense; it fades away, or if you are abjectly selfish, it only turns upon yourself.

What we wish to exalt in the kingdom of the spirit is the ideal home. What we wish to make palpable is the reality of affection instead of discord and hatred; and what we wish to make apparent to every heart is, that there cannot exist in the spiritual world a home without affection; there cannot exist affection without that overmantling charity which overlooks the evil in the light of the love that sees it.

If this were the case on earth, how many discordant households would be hushed to a calm by the benign presence of this spirit of love; and how truly typical would the earthly home become of that centre in spirit life.

Now, when you speak of place does it not sink into insignificance before the light of this supreme state which we have pictured? If the mother in spirit life still has children upon earth, she cannot dwell in a place that will separate her equally from all her children. One may be on the sea, another on the desert; thousands of miles intervene between them, but her love is equally present with all, and the centre of her love is the home of the spirit. To go to home and mother is to go to the love of the mother's heart: to go to the household in spirit life is to take off the film of outside being, and find them with you all the while. Their love is their home; their affection is the charmed stronghold, be it here on earth, or be it in the distant spaces. It is the state that makes the happiness, and the condition that makes the association.

If, however, any particular form of home-life is more acceptable to you than another; if any sacred memories cluster around place or time or condition here, then that form will weave itself into the spiritual habitation, and you will have it again, or as long as it is more sacred to you than any other form of expression. If you love in that expression of home-life some avenue of trees, or walls that seem sacred to you by association, you will find them reproduced in your kingdom of the spirit, so long as that form best expresses your highest ideal.