Death-and Afterwards

M

AN is not by any means convinced as

yet of his immortality. All the great religions have in concert, more or less positively, affirmed it to him; but no safe logic proves it, and no entirely accepted voice from some farther world proclaims it. There is a restless instinct, an unquenchable hope, a silent discontent with the very best of transitory pleasures, which perpetually disturb his scepticism or shake his resignation; but only a few feel quite certain that they will never cease to exist. The vast majority either put the question aside, being absorbed in the pursuits of life; or grow weary

of meditating it without result; or incline to think, not without melancholy satisfaction, that the death of the body brings an end to the individual. Of these, the happiest and most useful in their generation are the healthyminded ones who are too full of vigor or too much busied with pleasure or duty, to trouble themselves about death and its effects. The most enviable are such as find, or affect to find, in the authority or the arguments of any extant religion, sufficing demonstration of a future existence. And perhaps the most foolish are those who, following ardent researches of science, learn so little at the knees of their "star-eyed" mistress as to believe those forces which are called intellect, emotion, and will, capable of extinction, while they discover and declare the endless conservation of motion and matter.

If we were all sure, what a difference it would make! A simple "yes," pronounced

by the edict of immensely developed science; one word from the lips of some clearly accredited herald sent on convincing authority, would turn nine-tenths of the sorrows of earth into glorious joys, and abolish quite as large a proportion of the faults and vices of mankind. Men and women are naturally good; it is fear, and the feverish passion to get as much as possible out of the brief span of mortal years, which breed most human offences. And many noble and gentle souls, which will not stoop to selfish sins, even because life is short, live prisoners, as it were, in their condemned cells of earth, under what they deem a sentence from which there is no appeal, waiting in sad but courageous incertitude the last day of their incarceration; afraid to love, to rejoice, to labour, and to hope, lest love shall end in eternal parting, gladness in cheerless dust, generous toils in the irony of results effaced, and hope itself in a vast and scornful

denial. What a change if all these could really believe that they are cherished guests in an intermediate mansion of a benign universe, not doomed captives in one of its mournful dungeons! How happy as well as fair and attractive this planet would become if it were not a doctrine, not a theory, not a poetic dream, but a fact seen and accepted, that Death arrives, not like "Monsieur de Paris," to strip the criminal, to clip his collar and hair, and lop away from him life and love and delight; but as a mother lulling her children to sleep, so that they may wake ready for play in the fresh morning; as the gentlest angel of all the many ministers of man, bringing him far more than birth ever brought; and leading him by a path as full of miracles of soft arrangement, and as delicately contrived for his benefit as is the process of birth itself, to heights of advanced existence, simple, nevertheless, in their turn and order as are the first drops of the

breast-milk of his mother, and neither more nor less wonderful!

There is no new thing to say hereupon, even if one should personally and sincerely declare he was quite sure he had always existed, and should never cease to be. That would be worth nothing philosophically, nor be rendered a whit more valuable even if the speaker should have studied all the creeds, and mastered all the systems, and feel himself led by something beyond them to state the assurance which none of all these can give, or take away. Good-will may recommend a conviction, but cannot possibly impart it. Yet there are reflections, disjoined from all conventional assertions and religious dogmas, which may be worth inditing, rather as suggestions to other minds than arguments; rather as indications of fresh paths of thought than as presuming to guide along them. And the first which occurs is to represent the great mistake