Part 36 (1/2)
says Jeremy Collier, ”the nearer we are to immortal youth. All people are young in the other world. That state is an eternal spring, ever fresh and flouris.h.i.+ng. Now, to pa.s.s from midnight into noon on the sudden; to be decrepit one minute and all spirit and activity the next, must be a desirable change. To call this dying is an abuse of language.”
Death to the aged is natural, therefore as pleasant and easy as any other natural office of the body. Indeed, it is far easier than the operation by which we even get our teeth in youth. If we, then, are able to forget that greatest shock of pain so quickly as we do, why shall we dread a little sinking of the breath, and the unwilling battle of a body that is tired and
LITERALLY WILLING AT HEART
to surrender? ”In expectation of a better, I can with patience embrace this life,” says Sir Thomas Browne, ”yet in my best meditations do I often desire death. For a pagan there may be some motive to be in love with life; but for a Christian to be amazed at death, I see not how he can escape this dilemma--that he is too sensible of this life, or hopeless of the life to come.” We are now of the earth; but all the high reason which has taught us to master fire, and water, and the thunderbolts themselves, has also instructed us that we are only sojourners on this little planet.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE EVENING OF LIFE]
OUR MINDS ARE AS BROAD
as the range of stellar systems. We are not as large as a horse or an elephant. Are we, therefore, inferior? We are inhabiting bodies which thrive but a few years, on a planet remarkable for its smallness. But we stretch our knowledge over mighty distances; we construct triangles which have for one side the whole sweep of the earth, over 180 millions of miles; we measure the distance of other worlds by this side of a triangle, and the nearest star is thus found to be 103,000 of our measures away from us--103,000 times 180,000,000 miles! Young has well said that
THE UNDEVOUT ASTRONOMER IS MAD.
So did Napoleon die. Was he not the mightiest man of his time? Did not the whole world sigh with relief when the final end came? Yet he was on a tiny rock in the great ocean? On a map of the world that rock has no t.i.tle even to a dot. Yet it would be foolish to say he belonged simply to that rock. No. He had come from other human worlds. He was as broad as the earth. We, too, have come from other worlds. We are as broad as the universe. Even our minds, clad in clay, betray the high character of our souls.
DOES THE BEAST PEER INTO THE STARS?
Do the birds that pa.s.s so easily into the air go on voyages of discovery past Sirius? And yet the air refuses to bear us, and wafts them gently on its lightest zephyrs! We have sublime faculties--the fit companions of a soul. It is not our self-conceit. The Milky Way is not our conceit.
The eclipses are not our conceit. The awful sweep of our whole family of planets, moons, and sun, onward in celestial s.p.a.ce, is not a conceit.
Therefore we possess our souls, flas.h.i.+ng within caskets which have not been altogether unworthy of their priceless treasures.
AS THE CASKET DULLS
and grows to its decay, we cannot weep greatly over its loss, for will it not reveal the splendors all within?
”It is worthy the observing,” says Lord Bacon, ”wisest of men,” ”that there is no pa.s.sion in the mind of men so weak, but it mates and masters the fear of death; and, therefore, death is no such terrible enemy when a man hath so many attendants about him that can win the combat from him. Revenge triumphs over death; love slights it; honor aspireth to it; grief flieth to it; fear pre-occupateth it; nay, we read, after Otho the Emperor had slain himself,
PITY (WHICH IS THE TENDEREST OF AFFECTIONS)
provoked many to die out of mere compa.s.sion to their sovereign, and as the truest sort of followers. A man would die, though he were neither valiant nor miserable, only upon a weariness to do the same thing so oft over and over again.” We all must die, sooner or later. It is easier to die than to live again our stormy and tempestuous lives. Few would re-embark at the cradle, suffer the pains of childhood, the hurts which the feelings of youth get, the pangs of love, the shock of loneliness coming from the departure of those we cling to, the vicissitudes of fortune, the stings of penury, the journeys into the lands of strangers, the flight of summer friends, the alienation of children, and the fevers and the wounds which human nature crosses on its way to the kind haven of a good old age. Jesus stands near. When death comes, his voice will sound, just at the brink: ”It is I; be not afraid.” ”When I look at the tombs of the great,” said Joseph Addison, on
HIS VISIT TO WESTMINSTER ABBEY,
”every motion of envy dies in me; when I read the epitaphs of the beautiful, every inordinate desire goes out; when I meet with the grief of parents upon a tombstone, my heart melts with compa.s.sion; when I see the tomb of the parents themselves, I consider the vanity of grieving for those whom we must quickly follow. When I see Kings lying by those who deposed them, when I consider rival wits placed side by side, or the holy men that divided the world with their contests and disputes, I reflect with sorrow and astonishment on the little compet.i.tions, factions, and debates of mankind. When I read the several dates of the tombs, of some that died yesterday, and some six hundred years ago, I consider that great judgment day when we shall all of us be contemporaries, and make our appearance together.”
THE AGED MAN
who has ”walked with G.o.d” is always ready for the Master's call. His loins are girded about and his lights burning. He ”lies down with the Kings of the earth,” and that leveling process which is thus intimated and begun in death he feels is the order of a higher plane of life to come, when all the abuses and incongruities of human government will be swept away, and the light of omniscient wisdom will s.h.i.+ne on all alike.
There will he meet the little child who strayed from the fold into the snows of death early in the married life, and there will he sit beside that fond old heart who heard his first piteous wail in this cold world, and nestled him to her bosom all warm with a mother's love.
IT IS THE ONE POSSIBLE CHANCE