The Owosso times., 1897-06-11
Memorial Services.

Memorial services in memory of the
late Geo. M. Dewey were held in the
Congregational church, Sunday after
noon, and attended by large gathering
of Odd Fellows, Rebekahs and Patri-
archs Militant and citizens of this city
and Corunna. In front of the platform
was placed large portrait of Mr.. Dew
ey. A choir of ten voices sang appro-
pirate hymns and the pastor, Rev. j. c..
Cromer, offered prayer and read select
ed passages of scripture, after which
Rev. Geo. ii. Wilson, of Paxton, H.,
formerly pastor of the church IN this
city, and who knew the deceased as few
men knew him, delivered a thoughtful
and earnest memorial address, which
follows in FULL
Mans deepest interest is in life. To
Know it's meaning, to master its myster
les, to solve the intricate questions about
1T is all that we mean when we ask
Whence? Whittier? Why? Howg
Victor Hugo refers to small towns as
hot-beds of gossip. There is q reason
for this. Small towns exhibit less varie-
ty, less intensity, less of what may be
termed an aggregate of life in express
sion.
Large towns have so much of all this
that time is occupied mind attention
held, curiosity rushed hither and yon
and that we term gossip given a far
smaller place in the life of people.
Traced to its minutest and most vulgar
expression, gossip is only a perversion
of mans instructive desire to know life.
This same fact explains the element
of curiosity that so strangely minges in
those hours of sorrow and bereavement
| when death takes to the timeless world
those whom we know or know of. 1t
would be far from fitting to this occa-
sion that we stop to show this strange
mixture of the curious with the sympa-
thetic in the midst of human anguish
caused by human loss.
It assumes all forms. The mind train
ed to observe those native expressions
of man, that show through custom and
rise above form could never fail to note
both the eager and the grotesque in the
unuttered language of curiosity as it
stands about the pail or listens to words
evoked by the sorrow which death
brings. | have not in mind coarse
gossip nor Grass curiosity. | have
only in mind the fact that beneath all
the world thus referred to rests, in all
the world thus indicated, pulsates de-
sire to know about life, and that gossip
and the forms assumed by our curiosity
in the presence of death, and services
over or about the dead, rest in the de.
sire to know life.
At the bottom this it is which creates
and maintains place for such services
as we hold at this time. They are
held not for the dead, but for the living
Yet cannot agree with any assertion
that they cannot affect the dead. re-
call that Gen. Garfield once asserted
that the dead do not need us, but thai
we need them. believe they need us
believe it true of every past genera
ton that they without us cannot be
perfect. We are told by Paul in his
epistles to the Ephesians, one of the
mightiest pamphlets ever written, that
unto the principalities and powers in
the heavenly places is made known
through the church the manifold wis
dom of God.
The old Persian belief that the dead
turned restlessly in their coffins wher
living friends wept for them, is pic
ture of hope we may recall. If our dead
60 out into life, they can neither lose
the thought of us nor an interest in us
We are theirs as we'll as they ours. TC
my mind the failure on our part tC
reach the ideals they knew us to have
and which they approved, adds to the
weights which may entangle their spir
it's. That we may move Gods pity fol
them by our prayers, that we may give
them of our merit to stand to their &C
count, is the low, childish view of 9
gross age that erects purgatories to fat
ten priesthood, while it asserts trans
fer of merit such as outrages reason and
conscience and insults God.
But that the passage from the world
of time to the eternal world alters the
nature of spirit, we cannot believe.
That it destroys individual identity can
not be believed by one who believes thai
Jesus Christ discovered the individual
and revealed his Immortality.
That the laying aside of the body o
flesh and entering the world of spirits
to lose interest in us who remain, marks
the state of our dead, is repugnant tC
thought, contrary to Scripture, and al
discord with all we know of the great
law of sympathy in the order Of the
soul.
Because that we term sympathy, life
in life, is not of the lower order of ma
ture, but of the higher order of the soul
death doth not destroy it. Even as
Christ from the heights of his risen life
sees of the travail of his soul and shall
be satisfied, so from their high places
our sanctified dead shall see or not that
they lived for that they longed for,
that they loved as we through whom
they expected this realization are loyal
to what they purposed for us.
They whom we call "our loved ones
who are beyond, need us in all the high
devotement of life to what we know to
be their loftiest and best. believe il
to be worthy the effort of this hour te
fix this thought in mind. believe it to
be worthy of your consideration when
these feeble words shall return to you
on the printed page.
sat one afternoon this week in the
presence of q chastened soul, a sweet