COLE, Ralph Goldsmith
picture from findagrave
– 1860-1880 buried forest Home Cemetery, Mount Pleasant, Henry Co Iowa block 4
Lot 51 son of William Remy and Cordelia Cole
Source: Greencastle Star 4
Sept 1880 p 4
Under the above head (A Noble
Life) the Mt. Pleasant Iowa Free Press notices, at length the death of Ralph
Goldsmith Cole, a nephew of Mr. JW Cole of this city. The following extract
from the Free Press gives a clear insight to the nobility of character of the
young man: “To all who knew Ralph Cole, that solemn hour of nine marked the
passing away of one of the most heroic soul “that ever looked from human eyes.”
Counted by years he was young indeed; measured by life – purpose, convictions,
aspiration, conquest – he was older than many of the oldest. Clear as that
voice, that in the silence of night sounded in the eve of the youthful Samuel,
came to him the call that summoned him to the service of the Highest. Radiant
as that vision, that in the splendors of noonday under the blue skies of
Gallilee revealed itself to Paul of Tarsus on the way to Damascus, appeared to
him the vision of heavenly grade and youth (?) and with glad trust and reverent
obedience he followed whithersoever it led until he was drawn up into celestial
glory. His abiding consciousness of the
Ineffable Presence strengthened and sanctified his sense of human fellowship
and responsibility. The Divine
Fatherhood, the universal brotherhood, this was the creed, never formulated in
rigid statement by which he nobly lived and nobly died. Through this simple faith he looked with illumined
eyes on every human being. Like the
Eastern devotee who touches reverently even a soiled bit of paper lest upon it
should be written the name of the Infinite; so to him the meanest and vilest,
incarnated divine possibilities. It was
the inspiration of this faith that led him in the bloom of his youth to gladly
dedicate himself to the enslaved and despised, the great unwashed multitude
from which in the pride of Phariseeism the cultured too often turn away. It was this divine impulse that led him, when
in Chicago two years ago to visit the vicious and outcast, to study the
antecedents and environments, to put him
in sympathetic relations with him, to yearn for their redemption.
Nothing in all the history of loving service done for humanity’s sake is more
touching that this boy’s unreserved consecration to the classes for whom no one
seemed to care. On his recent journey to Colorado he could not pass Ft. Dodge,
Kansas without visiting the miserable depraved creatures imprisoned there and
so stined ? was his heart with a sense of their great need of humanizing
influenzes that he wrote remorsefully to his mother: “How can I leave them? How
can I wait for my work?” Marvellous utterances for a boy in the splender of
youth with the seducations of ease and pleasure and success, everywhere about
him. What wonder that the bereaved
parents, always so fully in sympathy with his worldly aims, should almost
refuse to be comforted; the mystery of life smites cruelly here. – kbz
