Another Day Will Begin Next Morning – Sunday, May 28, 1944
As the years were added upon his head, Victor Hugo wrote: “I feel immortality in myself. Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart. The nearer I approach the end, the plainer I hear around me the immortal symphonies of the world to come…. For a half century I have been writing my thoughts in prose and verse; but I feel I have not said one-thousandth part of what is in me. When I have gone down to the grave I shall have ended my day’s work; but another day will begin next morning. . .” It is comforting to read what great minds have caused to be written, but whether they had so written or not would neither affect the outcome nor alter man’s conviction. Man is himself the evidence of his own immortality. “God is not the God of the dead, but of the living,” (Matthew 22 -32) and Memorial Day is recognition of an undeniable conviction in men, that, being dead, they live.
And yet, as concerning life and death, there are those who would take issue with the decisions of the Almighty—those who, if they were running the affairs of the universe, would no doubt cause to live some who have died, and would shorten the years of some who now live unworthily. But we who find it difficult to make the simple decisions of our daily lives—difficult enough (and sometimes too difficult to keep straight our own personal affairs—could scarcely trust ourselves with the decisions of life and death. It is not given unto us to know the why of all things. Beyond every answer lies another question, and inevitably we come to know that we must live, in part at least, by faith—but a faith fortified with the all-sufficient assurance that though death do us part there is yet another meeting place where men shall know and be known by those they cherish; where they shall :find work to do, and shall grow in intelligence and godlike achievement, worlds without end. And neither the uncertainty of life nor the certainty of death can destroy the peace of those with whom is found such conviction—a conviction that could not be implanted by argument.
There are no words to convince a man of such an elemental truth if the evidence of it didn’t speak to him from his very being. And all our deference for the dead is its own testimony of that without which life would have no meaning.
By Richard L. Evans, spoken from the Tabernacle, Temple Square, Salt Lake City, Sunday, May 28, 1944, over Radio Station KSL and the nationwide Columbia Broadcasting System. Copyright – 1944.
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May 28, 1944
Broadcast Number 0,771