The Weekly Lancaster Gazette

Some fifteen years ago, Rev. John N. Maffit, then in his prime, delivered a lecture which closed with the following fine passage.

Phoenix, fabled bird of antiquity, when it felt the chill advances of age, built its funeral urn, and fired its pyre by means which nature's instinct taught.
All its plumage, and its form of beauty became ashes; but ever would rise the young--beautiful form the urn of death and chambers of decay would the fledgling come, with its eyes turned toward the sun, and essaying its dark velvet wings, sprinkled with gold and fringed with silver on the balmy air, rising a little higher, until at length, in the full confidence of flight, it gives a cry of joy, and soon becomes a glittering speck in the deep bosom of aerial ocean. Lovely voyage of earth, bound on its heavenward journey to the sun!

So rises the spirit bird from the ruins of the body, the funeral urn which its Maker built, and death frees. So towers away to its home, in the pure element of spirituality, the intellect Phoenix, to dip its proud wings in the fountain of eternal bliss.

So shall dear, precious humanity, surcharged with the elements of immortality, soar, within the disc of eternity's great luminous with undazzled eye and unscorched wings--the Phoenix of immortality--taken to its rainbow home and cradled on the beating bosom of eternal love.