Coming home from the burial of his little Agnes, the late Nehemiah Adams, D.D., of Boston, drew out of his pocket the ribbon-tied key of her casket. “I thought for a few minutes that I should lose my reason,” he writes. “The clouds returned after the rain,” and they were very dark and distressing. And who has not had similar experiences! And sometimes they are exquisitely painful as well as sorrowful, as when conscience reproaches us for unkindness, or remissness, or for hasty words and cruel alienation, or neglect of duty, as we hang over the coffin of a husband or wife, or parent or child, or friend, or come back from the new-made grave. The unnamed, unspeakable agony of a reproving conscience, when all redress or confession is impossible, is harder to bear than the blow itself. The after-cloud has no “silver lining”: it is murky, dismal, and almost unbearable, for it abides, and there is no relief from it. Let us be careful in life to give no occasion for such return of the clouds after the rain.
