ART gives appearance no reality. It provides a semblance, which indeed aims higher than reality on earth can ever be, but always in such a way that the emotions art awakens in us, bear an altogether different character from those awakened in us by life itself.
A funeral march of Chopin, a noble rendering of the: Like unto grass is our brief life, makes a string of mournfulness vibrate in your heart, but grief that rends your heart, when you yourself stand by the bier of one of your precious pledges of love, cuts so differently and so much more deeply. Meditations on the sacred mystery of being asleep in Jesus therefore, can never strike the true note, so long as it is enticed merely from the sense of art. It wells up in holy melody from your heart only, when that heart, wounded by grief of its own has found comforting and reconciliation in the assurance whispered within, that he who went from you fell asleep in Jesus.
If then in the Meditations, which herewith go out in book form, a note is sounded, which affects one gratefully and attunes the mood to reverence, it explains itself purely from the grief experienced, which inspired it. In days of affliction of soul the heart struggles until in God it lifts itself above its bereavement. From a de profundis it raises itself through the sursum corda to a gloria in excelsis, and then: Asleep in Jesus! is an exclamation of triumph.
He who is called to writing and used to writing for the public, expresses this also for other ears, and so Meditations come within reach of many to good effect. All that the royal Harpist sang, was sung from his own grief or from his own delights. And though a far higher historic power inspired him, from a far distance it remains true among us, that literature for the heart succeeded best, when it found its origin in the experience of one’s own soul.
Such was the case here, and for this reason, at the publication of this new volume I dare to foster the hope, that here something other and something better is offered than the tasteless food, which Job complained about with reference to his friends.
If there are others, whose heart must yet struggle through, what mine has struggled through, from these Meditations may there drip balsam for the wound of their soul.
The Hague, October 29, 1902 KUYPER