It was Christ Jesus Himself who gave His life to teach us this lesson. "I go to My Father," He said. And again to the repentent thief there on the cross beside Him, "Today shalt thou be with Me in Paradise." It is remarkable, I think, that we have clothed that word with meaning so foreign to our own experience. For what greater paradise to the worn and tired traveler than to return to his own home at nightfall? And where, but to the Father from whence he came, could that greatest of all human souls have sought to go?

We are wrong if we mourn for those whose work is done, whose hour of labor on this earth is finished. Only our own loss should cause us pain. For even as with glad and thankful hearts we welcome the newborn babe, so with understanding and insight into life's true meaning we should regard the final miraculous escape of the soul of a man or woman from the body that has held it a brief moment on this earth.

The physicist tells us that matter is indestructible, that even fire has no power to destroy but only to transform. Can any man with power of reflection and quiet thought regard this universe with its ordered suns and stars, this earth blessed with water, soil, and air, the power of growth of all its living things, as but a series of unrelated accidents? Can any man regard the growth of mind from the dawn of understanding in the ice caves of a far-off age to the spiritual communion of a church, the sweep of knowledge of a school or the intellectual interchanges of a parliament-can this great fact be sensed at all without belief in God? This mighty existence of which we find ourselves, for reasons utterly beyond our ken, a part, did not just happen. There is an Author, Sculptor, Artist, what you will, who has shaped and patterned it. And His highest of all works is the mind and soul of man. Is the work and travail of creation to be reasonably believed to be for naught? To say so is to speak what palpably is not and never can be true. No! This is no mockery. God's greatest work does not die. He takes it home to Himself again.

Who has not looked upon the stars and wondered at the power that holds them in their courses? And who thus

wondering has not known that that power is one of purpose, of intelligence, of absolute inclusiveness of all He has created and especially of all to whom He has given life.

THE MYSTIC

There is a quest that calls me,

In nights when I am lone,

The need to ride where the ways divide

The known from the unknown.

I mount what thought is near me
And soon I reach the place,

The tenuous rim where the seen grows dim
And the sightless hides its face.

I have ridden the wind,

I have ridden the sea,

I have ridden the moon and stars.

I have set my feet in the stirrup seat

Of a comet coursing Mars.

And everywhere

Through the earth and air

My thought speeds, lightning-shod.

It comes to a place where, checking pace,

It cries, "Beyond lies God!"

It calls me out of the darkness,

It calls me out of sleep,

"Ride! ride! for you must, to the end of dust!"

It bids-and on I sweep

To the wide outposts of being,

Where there is gulf alone

And thro' a vast that was never passed

I listen for life's tone.

I have ridden the wind,

I have ridden the night,

I have ridden the ghosts that flee

From the vaults of death like a chilling breath
Over eternity.

And everywhere

Is the world laid bare

Ether and star and clod

Until I wind to its brink and find

But the cry, "Beyond lies God!"

It calls me and ever calls me!

And vainly I reply,

"Fools only ride where the ways divide
What is from the whence and why!"
I'm lifted into the saddle

Of thoughts too strong to tame

And down the deeps and over the steeps

I find-ever the same.

I have ridden the wind,

I have ridden the stars,

I have ridden the force that flies

With far intent thro' the firmament

And each to each allies.

And everywhere

That a thought may dare

To gallop, mine has trod

Only to stand at last on the strand

Where just beyond lies God.

-Cole Young Rice.

Yesterday our colleagues stood with us on "the strand where just beyond lies God." Today they have crossed over. Today they understand. No longer do they search for explanations and for truth. They are gone beyond the veil that cloaks the answers to all mysteries from those of us who still must live. It is not in mourning that we honor them. But rather in seeing that to us is given one great duty and the opportunity and means of being true to their memory. For we can dedicate ourselves to struggling to complete the work which they began. These whose memory we honor here today, now see face to face the meaning of all life and death and sacrifice and creative love. For where they are, there the Source of Life resides.

Let us turn then with understanding to the uncompleted task of building that better world which those who have gone before have helped make possible. May the good they did upon this earth live on after them through the efforts of us who called them friends. Ours is the torch they have laid down-these Members of the House and Senate and men like them around the world today. Their memory, their

influence, their very spirit on this earth will live if we keep faith with them. May the peace of God which passeth understanding keep their hearts and minds this day and always, and may His inspiration guide and spur us on as we strive to hold high the torch they have passed on to us.

Corp. Glenn Darwin sang Abide With Me.

Hon. KARL E. MUNDT, a Representative from the State of South Dakota, delivered the following address:

ADDRESS BY MR. KARL E. MUNDT

Mr. SPEAKER: We meet today for a purpose which has the dignity and tenderness of funeral rites without their acute sadness. We are drawn together today not by a new bereavement but one which time has softened and mellowed. We are here to pay tribute to those Members of the Senate and the House who have joined the realm of the invisible since we last met here a year ago in a memorial service. It is our privilege today to honor those who have passed on. We freshen with the dew of recollection the fragrant blossoms of love and understanding wreathed about the memories of our departed. We do well to pause annually for an occasion such as this. We approach this session with eyes undimmed by tears but with hearts filled with the tender thoughts of remembrance and retrospection. We meet here not only to honor the memory of those who have gone but to remind ourselves that soon or late each of us must hearken to the call and take our place with those preceding us in the silent halls of death, there to bivouac together in our low green tents waiting the reveille and the reunion of the resurrection.

Joseph Addison once represented humanity as a great throng passing over a bridge, having numerous secret trap doors, which unexpectedly open now and then letting the passengers pass through until toward the end of the last span no one remains to pass. What a true picture of life that represents. Some are nipped in the bud, others fall at blossom time, some fall by the wayside at mid-maturity, and few

there are who are privileged to ripen and retain their earthly functions beyond their allotted three score years and ten. We who serve together in the Congress of the United States know that each year sees the passing of a certain number of our associates into the realm beyond and above the valley. Slowly but surely our ranks are constantly thinned. We pause on the speedy highway of life today to commemorate the lives of those who have answered the distant call.

As we pause together to pay tribute to the departed, we find courage in the fact that life does not end with the lapse of mortal breath. We are buoyed by the evidences of life after death which Nature provides us in every environment. The beautiful sunset is but the beginning of a glorious sunrise. Twilight finds its inspiring finish in the dawn. The dry leaves descending in the fall provide the rich mulch to protect the tender shoots of life reappearing in the spring. When we go down into the valley of the shadow it can be said that we have finished the day's work, but it cannot be said that we have finished our lives. Our day's work will begin anew with the following morning. The tomb is not a blind alley or a dead-end street. It is a thoroughfare. As it closes on the twilight, it opens on the dawn. Edith Davis Rowe expressed it well when she wrote:

Some day our ears will cease to hear,

Our limbs will cease to walk,

Our eyes will close to mortal scenes,
Our tongue no more will talk;
Our hands will never work again,

Our heart will stop its beat,

But yet for years our work will stay
To make our lives complete.

The things we made will still be used,
The things we write be read,

The things we've said will, too, live on
In others' minds instead.

And so our lives go on and on

Through generations more,
The products of the human mind
Are tripled by the score.