When you take the wires of the cage apart, you do not hurt the bird, but help it. You let it out of its prison. How do vou know that death does not help me when it takes the wires of my cage down? — that it does not release me, and put me into some better place, and better condition of life?

Randolph S. Foster (1820-1903) American Methodist Episcopal bishop, preacher, educator

“Man a Spiritual Being,” Lecture 2, Chautauqua, New York (1878)
    (Source)

Collected in his Beyond the Grave: Being Three Lectures Before Chautauqua Assembly in 1878 (1879).