THE BLOSSOM OF THE CENTURY. CHAPTER I. THE INTUITIVE PERCEPTION OF A TRUTH THAT HAS NOT AS YET BEEN MADE APPARENT TO THE REASONING FACULTIES. In looking back I now see that a belief in death as a fixed and unalterable fact never had full possession of me. I doubt whether, in the true sense, it really has full possession of any one ; for, while it seems real enough, so far as the dying of other people is concerned, we rarely think of it as being an inevitable reality for ourselves. It always seems a far off and shadowy possibility, but not an irresistible fate such as a man feels it to be who is under sentence of death for some crime. And yet reason, so far as our reason is based on observation, tells us that death is as certain to come to us as to the condemned felon in his cell. And why are we so little disturbed by it? Is it because we anticipate life beyond the grave? The felon also anticipates this; and, moreover, his expectations for happiness in another world are usually as bright to his imagination as ours can be. Then why does he dread death while we do not? It is because he realizes that to him it is inevitable, while we realize nothing of the kind. To be sure our reason, based on observation, admits that it is inevitable; but there is in us some hidden impulse that denies the inevitableness of it. And this hidden impulse betrays the presence, deep down at the very fountain head of individual existence, of some unseen spring of ever present vitality, the discovery of which will overcome death. We feel it, though we do not see it; and there is an undefined something in man that lives more by feeling than seeing, and so death is inwardly rejected while verbally accepted. If man accepted death all over, in his inner as well as his outer consciousness, he would feel about it very much as this condemned felon does. It would occupy his every thought and render him unfit for any effort in life ex cept a preparation for death. In short the certain knowledge of coming death would be equivalent to present death so far as the uses of life are concerned. But men are not expecting to die; their lives prove it; they are deeply interested in a thousand schemes of activity, and they are happy in their efforts to better their conditions and to surround themselves with pleasing things. "Death is inevitable," they say, but their words do not touch them; they do not excite them in the least. It is only when they feel its icy touch that they begin to have even the slightest realization of it as applicable to their own cases. As soon as men begin to feel that death is impending, their fear is then aroused and they seek to escape from it. That they do fear it and seek to escape from |