Time & Perspective Quote by Thomas Starr King

A deathbed line that refuses the era's favorite script: the pious farewell as grim warning. Thomas Starr King looks past the melodrama and offers something almost disarming in its calm. The first sentence, "It is strange", is the hinge. Not fear, not certainty, but a brief admission of human bewilderment before the metaphysical. That small shrug of language makes the rest credible.

Then he performs a subtle rhetorical pivot: he names "privileges and greatness" not as possessions he held, but as qualities of "the future". For a clergyman who spent the Civil War years urging moral seriousness and civic resolve (and, in California, helping keep the Union cause emotionally solvent), that future-facing emphasis matters. He's not tallying a personal heaven-reward; he's testifying to an onwardness that outlives him. "It already looks grand, beautiful" compresses eschatology into aesthetics. The afterlife isn't argued; it's seen. Vision replaces doctrine, which is exactly how a public religious figure tries to comfort a mixed audience of believers, skeptics, and the merely exhausted.

"Tell them" turns private dying into public messaging. Even at the edge, he's managing a community's emotional weather. The triad "lovingly, trustfully, peacefully" is pastoral craft: love anchors him to people, trust lifts him toward God, peace smooths the social aftermath. Subtext: don't make my death a crisis of faith; make it a usable example. In wartime America, that was a political act as much as a spiritual one.