Immortality

Performed by William Jennings Bryan
Recorded June 15, 1908

Christ gave us proof of immortality, and yet it would hardly seem necessary that one should rise from the dead to convince us that the grave is not the end. To every created thing God has given a tongue that proclaims resurrection. If the Father deigns to touch with divine power the cold and pulseless heart of the buried acord and to make it burst forth from its prison walls, will he leave neglected in the earth the soul of man, made in the image of his Creator? If he stoops to give to the rose bush, whose withered blossoms float upon the autumn breeze, the sweet asurance of another springtime, will He refuse the words of hope to the sons of men when the frosts of winter come? If matter, mute and inanimate, tho changed by the forces of nature into a multitude of forms, can never die, will the imperial spirit of man suffer annihilation when it had paid a brief visit like a royal guest to this tenement of clay? No, I am as sure that there is another life as I am that I live today. In Cairo I secured a few grains of wheat that had slumbered for more than three thousand year in an Egyptian tomb. As I looked at them this thought came into my mind: If one of those grains had been planted on the banks of the Nile the year after it grew, and all its lineal descendants planted and replanted from that time until now, its progency would today be sufficiently numerous to feed the teeming millions of the world. There is in the grain of wheat an invisible something that has power to discard the body that we see, and from earth and air fashion a new body so much like the old one that we cannot tell the one from the other. And if this invisible germ of life in the grain of wheat can thus pass unimpaired through three thousand resurrections, I shall not doubt that my soul has power to clothe itself with a body suited to its new existence when this earthly frame has crumbled into dust.