Naked came I out of my mother's womb.'
We need not dwell on the figure' mother,' suggesting the grave as the kindly mother's bosom that gathers us all in, and the thought that perhaps gleams forth that death, too, is a kind of birth.
But the truth picturesquely set forth is just the old and simple one, that all possessions are transient.
The naked self gets clothed and lapped round with possessions, but they are all outside of it, apart from it individuality. It has been without them. It will be without them. Death at the end will rob us of them all.
The inevitable law of loss is fixed and certain. We are losing something every moment, not only possessions, but all our dearest ties are knit but for a time, and sure to be snapped. They go, and then after a while we go.
The independence of each soul of all its possessions and relations is as certain as the loss of them. They may go and we are made naked, but still we exist all the same. We have to learn the hard lesson which sounds so unfeeling, that we can live on in spite of all losses. Nothing, no one, is necessary to us.
All this is very cold and miserable; it is the standing point of law and necessity. An atheist could say it. It is the beginning of the Christian contemplation of life, but only the beginning.
