Chapter XXX: Letter XXVI: The Choice of a Profession (5)

Various writers of splendid genius have tasked their imagination, to present us with the results of endowing a person with immortality on earth. Such a character has been delineated with great power by Godwin, in his St Leon; and by Croly in the story of _Salathiel, or the Wandering Jew_. It is an instructive labor, to record the wanderings, changes, weariness, abandonment, and final despair of a wretch cursed with immortality; and by the circumstance rendered a monster, out of relation with human beings; and cut off from all real sympathy with his mortal kind. It is questionable, whether these writers, or any others who have drawn similar pictures, have formed adequate conceptions, of what would be the actual result of an earthly immortality. The view of the author before me seems just. I can easily imagine the immortal delivered from earthly sorrows. But, when I contemplate him divested of the hopes, fears, affections and sympathies, which trace their origin to our common mortal nature, I cannot imagine the affections, that are to replace these.

I can conceive none other, than a being, who would become drowsy at sixty, and sleepy at a hundred. All beyond presents to me a lethargy of almost unconscious existence, from which my fancy can devise no effort of sufficient energy to arouse him. In fact, it is sufficient, that nature has awarded, in her universal decree, that man should not be out of analogy and relation with the rest of nature; to convince us, that the decision involves our best interest. The more our views of nature enlarge, the more we become conscious, that she has arranged all her laws with such perfect wisdom, that if we could reverse any of them, we should do it at the expense of our own happiness.

Of all pictures of men, rendered immortal upon earth, the most forcible, brief and revolting, is that of Swift. ‘After this preface, he gave me a particular account of the Struldbrugs among them. He said, they commonly acted like mortals, till about thirty years old; after which they grew melancholy and dejected, increasing in both till they came to fourscore. This he learned from their own confession; for otherwise, there not being more than two or three of that species born in an age, they were too few to form a general observation by. When they come to fourscore years, which is reckoned the extremity of living in this country, they had not only all the follies and infirmities of other men, but many more, which arose from the dreadful prospect of never dying. They were not only opinionative, covetous, peevish, morose, vain, talkative, but incapable of friendship, and dead to all natural affection, which never descended below their grandchildren. Envy and their impotent desires are their prevailing passions. But those objects, against which their envy seems particularly directed, are the vices of the younger sort, and the death of the old. By reflecting on the former, they find themselves cut off from all possibility of pleasure; and whenever they see a funeral, they lament, and repine, that others have gone to a harbor of rest, at which they can never hope to arrive. They have no remembrance of anything, but what they learned, and observed in their youth and middle age, and even that is very imperfect; and for the truth or particulars of any fact, it is safer to depend on common tradition, than their best recollection. The least miserable among them, are those, who turn to dotage, and entirely lose their memories. These meet with more pity and assistance, because they want many bad qualities, which abound in others.

‘If a Struldbrug happen to marry one of his kind, the marriage is dissolved of course, by the courtesy of the kingdom, as soon as the younger of the two comes to be fourscore; for the law thinks it a reasonable indulgence, that those, who are condemned, without any fault of their own, to a perpetual continuance in the world, should not have their misery doubled by the load of a wife. As soon as they have completed the term of eighty years, they are considered dead in law. At ninety they lose their teeth and hair, and have no distinction of taste, but eat and drink whatever they can get, without relish or appetite. The diseases they were subject to, still continue without increasing, or diminishing. In talking, they forget the common appellations of things, and the names of persons, even of those, who are their nearest friends and relations. For the same reason, they can never amuse themselves with reading, because their memory will not serve to carry them from the beginning of a sentence to the end; and by this defect they are deprived of the only entertainment whereof they might be capable.

‘They were the most mortifying sight I ever beheld, and the women more horrible than the men. Besides the usual deformities in extreme old age, they acquired an additional ghastliness, in proportion to their number of years, which is not to be described; and among half a dozen, I soon distinguished who was the oldest, although there was not above a century or two between them.

‘The reader will easily believe, from what I have heard and seen, that my keen appetite for perpetuity and life was much abated. I grew heartily ashamed of the pleasing visions I had formed, and thought no tyrant could invent a death into which I would not run with pleasure, from such a life. The king heard all that had passed between me and my friends upon this occasion, and rallied me very pleasantly, wishing I could send a couple of Struldbrugs to my own country, to arm our people against the fear of death.’

Note 61, page 171.

Fear, absolutely useless, gratuitous fear, probably constitutes much the largest proportion of the whole mass of human misery; and of this proportion the fear of death is the principal part. There are but very few people who, in examining the feeling of revulsion and horror, most constantly present to their minds, will not find it to be the dread of death. The whole observation, which I have made upon human nature, has only enlightened me the more as to the universality and extent of the influence of this evil. I see it infusing bitterness into the bosoms of the young, before they are as yet capable of reflection; and ceasing not to inspire its terrors into the heart, which has experienced the sorrows of fourscore winters. I see little difference in the alarm with which it darkens the mind of the heir, elate with youthful hope, and the galley slave--those apparently the most happy, and the tenants of penitentiaries and lazar-houses. All cling alike convulsively to life, and shudder at the thought of death.

Part, and perhaps the greater part, of this fear is a sad heritage, which has been transmitted down to us, an accumulating fund of sorrow, for a hundred generations. I have stated my conviction in another place, that our education, religious ceremonies, domestic manners, in short, all the influences of the present institutions of society tend to increase this evil. I am well aware, at the same time, that the number of those, who will admit it to be an evil, is but small. Most view it as it has been considered in all Christian countries, from time immemorial, as an instrument in the hand of God and his servants, to awe, and restrain the mind, recall it from illusions and vanities, and reduce it to the seriousness and obedience of religion. The broad declamation of the pulpit for effect, revolting representations of hell-torment and the vindictive justice of God, have passed with a readier tolerance, under a kind of tacit allowance, that if the means were unworthy, the proposed end was such as would sanctify them. It is almost unnecessary to remark, that all my hope of producing any useful impression is with the small, but growing number, (in the next age, I trust, it will be a majority) who hold this whole doctrine in utter unbelief; who have no faith in amendment and conversion, that grows out of the base and servile principle of fear; and least of all the fear of death; who believe that a great reform, a thorough amelioration of our species, will never be effected, until it is made a radical principle of our whole discipline, and all our social institutions, to bring this servile passion completely under the control of our reason. With these, it is a deep and fixed conviction, that every thing base, degrading and destructive of intellect and improvement, readily associates with fear; and that the basis of true religion, generous conception, high thoughts and really noble character, is firmly laid in a young mind, when trained to become as destitute of fear, as if it were conscious of being a sinless angel, above the reach of pain or death.

It would be to no purpose for me to pause in this place, to obviate the strictures of those who will denounce this doctrine, by quoting from the scriptures the frequent inculcations of the _fear of the Lord_, and the Apostle’s declaration, that by the _terrors of the Lord we persuade men_. The true and religious fear, inculcated in the scriptures, not only has no relation to the passion I am discussing, but cannot exist, any more than the other requisite traits of religious character, in a bosom swayed by the grovelling and selfish passion of servile fear.

That nature has implanted in our bosoms an instinctive dread of death, I readily admit. But fear, as a factitious and unnatural addition to the true instincts of human nature, has been so accumulated by rolling down through a hundred generations, that we are in no condition to know the degree, in which nature intended we should possess it. We have innumerable base propensities, which we charge upon nature, that are, in fact, no more, than the guilty heritage, bequeathed us by our ancestors. Nature could have implanted no higher degree of instinctive dread of death, than just what was requisite, to preserve the race from prodigal waste, or rash exposure of a gift, which, once lost, is irretrievable. If nature has inwrought in any constitution one particle of fear, beyond what was required for this result, she has, as in all other excessive endowments, granted reason and judgment, to regulate, and reduce it to its due subordination.

Will not religion achieve the great triumph of casting out the base principle of fear? I would be the last to deny, or undervalue the trophies of true religion. I have no doubt that religion has, in innumerable instances, extracted the pain and poison from the sting of death. More than this, it would unquestionably produce this triumph in every case, if every individual were completely under the influence of the true principle. It would attain this end by processes and discipline exactly concurrent, if not similar, with those I am about to propose. But it is a lamentable fact, that very few are under the influence of true religion. Of those, whom charity deems most sincerely pious, under all professions and forms, the far greater number exhibit, on the bed of dangerous sickness, the same fear of death with the rest. We consider this a generally conceded fact; for, among all but the most extravagant sects, death-bed terror, or triumph has ceased to be considered a test of the personal religion of the deceased. Even in the cases of enthusiastic triumph in the last moments, which we have all witnessed, and which are justly so soothing to the survivors, it would often be difficult to determine the respective influence of laudanum, and partial insanity doing its last work upon the nervous system.

Be this as it may, the triumph over the fear of death, which I would inculcate, should not be tested by the equivocal deportment of the patient, in the near view of death; but by his own joyous consciousness of deliverance from this tormenting thraldom and bondage, during his whole life. Let fear and horror crowd what bitterness they may into the last few hours, it can bear but little proportion to the long agony of a whole life, passed in _bondage through fear of death_. To produce the desired triumph, the highest training of philosophy should concur with the paternal spirit and the immortal hopes of the gospel; and a calm, reasoning, unboasting fearlessness of death should enable us to taste all the little of pure and innocent joy, that may be found between the cradle and the grave--as unmolested, as unsprinkled with this fear, as if the destroyer were not among the works of God.

How may this result be obtained? How may a generation be so trained as to lose not a particle of enjoyment, nor be influenced to one unworthy act, by the fear of death? To answer these questions, in the requisite detail of illustration, would require volumes. It might, perhaps, best be done by selecting a single child as an example; and by developing, at every advancing step, the process of his training; pointing out every instance, in which it would be necessary to withdraw him from the influence of the present systems of discipline; in which, in a word, his whole education should be conducted with a preponderant purpose, among other desirable results, to render him perfectly fearless of death. It is hoped that some one of those, who believe this a chief desideratum in the reformation and improvement of the present system of education, will take this great point in hand; and in this way indicate to the age the modes of discipline, through which this result may be expected. It is obvious, that a much severer discipline would be required for the first generation so trained, than for the second; who, with less transmitted cowardice than their parents, would perpetuate a constantly improving moral constitution to the generations to come. My present plan admits only a brief summary of motives and arguments, commonly adduced, as calculated to diminish, regulate, and subdue the fear of death. It is evident, that these motives and arguments are predicated upon present opinions, and such as may be supposed capable of acting upon the existing generation, enduring the hereditary and inculcated bondage of this passion.

1. The terrific and undefinable images of horror, that imagination affixes to the term _death_, are founded in an entire misconception. The word is the sign of no positive idea whatever. It conjures up a shadowy horror to the mind, finely delineated, as a poetic personage, by Milton; and implies some agony that is supposed to lie between the limits of existence and non-existence, or existence in another form. This is simple illusion. So long as we feel, death is not--and when we cease to feel, or commence feeling in a changed form, death has been:--_fuit mors_. So that the term imports a mere phantom of the imagination. In the words of Droz, ‘it is not yet; or it is past.’ If one can arrest the _punctum stans_, and the actual sensation, where waking consciousness terminates, and sleep commences, he can tell us, what death is. Every one is conscious of having passed through this change; but no one can give any account, what were his sensations in the dividing moment of interval between wakefulness and sleep.

2. Imagination is allowed to settle all the circumstances, and form all the associations belonging to the supposed agony of this event. It is one of the few important incidents in life, upon which reason is never allowed to fix a calm and severe scrutiny. It has been seen in a light, too sacred and terrible, to permit such a lustration. ‘It is dreadful,’ says common apprehension, ‘for it is the breaking up the long and tender partnership, and producing a separation between the body and the soul--dreadful, because it is the wages of sin, and is appointed to be a perpetual memorial of the righteous displeasure of God in view of sin;’ ‘dreadful,’ say others, who most unphilosophically believe that man was not originally intended to be mortal, ‘because a violence upon nature; dreadful, because a departure of the spirit from the regions of the living, and the light of the sun, into an unknown and eternal condition. Suns will revolve, moons wax and wane, years, revolutions, ages, counted by all the particles of mist in the sea, will elapse, but the place, whence the spirit is gone, will never know it more.’ ‘It is terrible,’ says common apprehension, ‘for it is often preceded and accompanied by spasm, and convulsive struggle.’ The psalmody, which we sing in church, speaks of the _ghastly paleness_, the _chill sweat_, and the _mortal coldness_, circumstances all, which, seen in other associations, would assume no aspect of peculiar terror.

Then, too, the attendants in the sick room with a look of horror inspect the extremities of the patient, and petrify bystanders with the terrible words, ‘he is struck with death,’ as though the grisly phantom king of the poet’s song had invisibly glided in, and, with his icy sceptre, given his victim the blow of mortal destiny. Who knows not that, though there are usually mortal symptoms, which enable an experienced eye to foresee approaching dissolution, the term _death-struck_ imports nothing but the weakest vulgar prejudice, a prejudice under the influence of which millions have been suffered to expire, that might have been roused! Innumerable persons, pronounced to be in that situation, have actually recovered; and no moment, in the ordinary forms of disease, can with any certainty be pronounced beyond hope and the chances of aid, but that which succeeds the last sigh. Thus every thought of the living, and every aspect of the dying, by a wayward ingenuity, heightens the imagined horror of the event.

Then there are conversations and hymns and funeral odes and Night Thoughts, which speak of the coldness, silence and eternal desolation of the grave; as though the unconscious sleeper felt the chill of the superincumbent clay, the darkness of his narrow house or this terrible isolation from the living. The pale and peaceful corpse is contemplated with a look of horror. Two, of stout heart and tried friendship, abide near the kneaded clod, until the living are relieved from their ghostly terrors, by its deposition out of their sight in the narrow house. The family, the children, the friends alike showing the creeping horror, glide quick and silently on tiptoe through the apartment, where the sleeper lies. The first nightfall after the disease is one of peculiar and unmitigated horror. The family, however disinclined to union before, this evening unite, with that impress on their countenances, which words reach not. Now return to their thoughts the nursery tales, the thrilling narratives of haunted houses and wandering ghosts; and if the minister comes among them, it is probably to evoke before their imaginations condemned spirits doomed to eternal sufferings, quenchless flames, groans without respite, and all the ineffable and eternal torments, that the clerical vocabulary of centuries has accumulated.

Need we wonder, that in a christian country, and among families of the best training, such impressions have become so universal, that they, who would be reputed brave, blazon their courage, by affirming their readiness to sleep in a cemetery, or the funeral vault of a church! It requires no extraordinary effort, and nothing more than the simple triumph of reason among the faculties, to enable any man, to sleep alone in a charnel house with as little dread, as in the apartment of an inn, so that the places were alike in comfort and salubrity. It does not require us to be wise, or courageous; but simply not cowards and fools, to feel as little horror in the view of corpses, as statues of plaster or marble. One of the most terrible ideas of death, after all, is, that we shall thus, immediately upon our decease, inflict this shrinking revulsion of terror upon all, who look at our remains.

The view, which reason takes of the sick and dying bed is, that, in the far greater number of mortal cases, the transition from life to death is as imperceptible, as the progress of the sun and the seasons. One faculty dies after another. The victim has received the three warnings unconsciously. Ordinarily, a person may be said to have paid a third part of his tribute of mortality at forty-five; half at fifty-five; and the whole at three score and ten.

When acute and severe sickness assails the patient, he has passed through what may be called the agony of death at a very early period of his disease. His chief suffering is past, as soon the irritability and the vigorous powers of life have been broken down. When the disorder assumes the typhoid and insensible form, the dull sleep, that precedes the final rest of the tomb, is already creeping upon him; and severe suffering is precluded. If there are convulsions after this, as often happens, they are seldom more than spasmodic movements, impressed by the nervous action upon the tendons, more terrible to the beholder, than the sufferer; differing little from those starts and struggles, with which many persons in high health commence sleeping and waking. He who has experienced the sensation of fainting, and, still more, of an epileptic fit, has suffered, I am ready to believe, all that there is in dying.

3. Reason, calmly surveying the case of the dying person himself, sees many alleviations, of which imagination, sketching under the influence of the dread of death, takes no account. He finds himself, in this new predicament, the absorbing object of all interests and all solicitude and affection. It is not in human nature, that this should not call up complacent emotions and slumbering affections from their secret cells. The subsequent progress towards the last moment brings an imperceptibly increasing insensibility, manifested by drowsiness and sleep. Of those, who preserve the exercise of their faculties entire to the last, many instances are recorded of persons, who had shown the most unmanly dread of death in their health, that have met dissolution with the calmness of perfect self-possession. Of the rest, the greater number die with little more apparent pain and struggle, than accompany the act of sleeping. The greater freshness, vigor and nervous irritability of young people and children cause that most of the exceptions are of this description. In a great number of cases, which I have witnessed, I have paused in doubt, whether the person had yielded his last sigh, or not, after he had actually deceased. To soften the last infliction, nature almost invariably veils it under a low delirium, or absolute unconsciousness.

4. It is impossible to imagine a more obvious and unquestionable principle of philosophy, than that every reasoning faculty of our nature must declare to us, loudly and unequivocally, and with an influence as strong as reason can command, that it is wisdom, nay, the dictate of the least portion of common sense, to dread, to resist, to repine, to groan, as little as possible, in view of an endurance absolutely inevitable. If it be hard to sustain when met with a fearless, resigned and unmurmuring spirit, it must certainly be still harder, when we are obliged to bend our necks to it with the excruciating addition of shrinking fear, dreadful anticipation and ineffectual struggles to evade it, and with murmurs and groans, at finding the inutility of these efforts. Innumerable examples prove to us, that nature has kindly endowed us with reason and mental vigor to such an extent, that, under the influence of right motive and training, no possible form of suffering can be presented, over which this power may not manifest, and has not manifested a complete triumph.

Of these innumerable examples, it is only necessary to cite those of the martyrs, of all forms of religion. These prove farther, that this undaunted self-possession, in every conceivable shape and degree of agony, was not the result of a rare and peculiar temperament, a want of sensibility, or the possession of uncommon physical courage; that it was not because there was no perception of danger, or susceptibility of pain; this magnanimity, this impassibility to fear and pain and death has been exhibited in nearly equal degrees by people of every age, each sex and all conditions. Let the proper motive be supplied, let the martyr have had the common influence of the training of his faith, and the consequence failed not. All the shades and varieties of natural and mental difference of character were noted in the deportment of the sufferers. But they were alike in the stern proof of a courage, which defied death. The fact is proved by them, as strongly as moral fact can be proved, that the mind of every individual might find in itself native self-possession and vigor, to enable it to display an entire ascendency over fear, pain and death.

Nor does this fact rest solely for support on the history of martyrs, or sufferers at an _Auto da fé_, or by torture in any of its forms. We could find examples of it in every department of history, and every view of human character. The red men of our wilderness, as we have elsewhere seen, are still more astonishing illustrations of this fact--I say astonishing, because the timid and effeminate white man shivers, and scarcely credits his senses, as he sees the young Indian warrior smoking his pipe, singing his songs, boasting of his victories and uttering his menaces, when enveloped in a slow fire, apparently as unmoved, as reckless and unconscious of pain, as if sitting at his ease in his own cabin. All, that has been found necessary, by this strange people, to procure this heroism, is, that the children, from boyhood, should be constantly under a discipline, every part and every step of which tends directly to shame and contempt at the least manifestation of cowardice, in view of any danger, or of a shrinking consciousness of pain in the endurance of any suffering. The males, so trained, never fail to evidence the fruit of their discipline. Sentenced to death, they almost invariably scorn to fly from their sentence, when escape is in their power. If in debt, they desire a reprieve, that they may hunt, until their debts are paid. They then voluntarily return, and surrender themselves to the executioner. Nothing is more common than for a friend to propose to suffer for his friend, a parent for a child, or a child for a parent. When the sufferer receives the blow, there is an unblenching look, which manifests the presence of the same spirit, that smokes with apparent unconcern amidst the crackling flames.

A proof, that this is the fruit of training, and not of native insensibility, as others have thought, and as I formerly thought myself, is that this contempt of pain and death is considered a desirable trait only in the males. To fly, like a woman, like her to laugh, and weep, and groan, are expressions of contempt, which they apply to their enemies with ineffable scorn. The females, almost excluded from witnessing the process of Spartan discipline, by which the males acquire their mental hardihood, partake not of the fruits of it, and with some few exceptions, are shrinking and timid, like the children of civilization.

I know, that there will not be wanting those, who will condemn alike the training and the heroism, as harsh, savage, unfeeling, stoical and unworthy to be admitted, as an adjunct to civilization. But no one will offer to deny, that the primitive Christian, put in conflict with a hungry lion, that Rogers at the Smithfield stake, that the young captive warrior, exulting, and chanting his songs while enduring the bitterest agonies that man can inflict, in the serene and sublime triumph of mind over matter, and spirit over the body, is the most imposing spectacle we can witness, the clearest proof we can contemplate, that we have that within us which is not all of clay, nor all mortal; or doubt, that these persons endure infinitely less physical pain, in consequence of their heroic self-possession, than they would have suffered, had they met their torture in paroxysms of terror, shrinking and self-abandonment.

However we may reason, however we may decry these views, as savage, impracticable, unnatural and undesirable, the fact is, that we all feel alike upon this subject. The thousands in a Roman amphitheatre only evinced a trait, that belongs to our common nature, when they instantly, and without consulting each other, gave the signal to save that gladiator, who most clearly manifested cool self-possession and contempt of death. After witnessing the execution of a criminal, who shows courage, the spectators go away describing, with animated gesture, and in terms of admiration, the fearlessness of the fellow the moment before his death. We all speak with unmingled satisfaction of the circumstance, in the death of our friends, that they departed in the conscious dignity of self-possession and hope. All readers are moved with one sensation, as they read the record of the noble trait in the character of Cæsar, gracefully folding himself in his mantle, after he had received so many mortal thrusts. Few of us hear unmoved of the old English patriot, who requested the executioner to support him up the steps to the scaffold, adding that he would shift for himself to get down; or of the other, who cried, as he stooped his head to the block, _dulce et decorum est pro patria mori_! If I recollect, it is Silliman, who gives the affecting notice of the last hours of the duke of Richmond, the late governor general of Canada. Invested with all conceivable circumstances to render life desirable, he was bitten by a favorite dog in a rabid state; and died, in the most excruciating tortures, of the terrible hydrophobia. When the horrible paroxysm was felt by him to be approaching, he was accustomed to nerve his sinking courage by these words; ‘Henry, remember, that none of your ancestors were cowards.’ I give the trait from recollection, but have heard substantially the same account from other sources. This is the secret of the perverse general admiration of warriors, and heroes, and great generals. It is this principle in its blindness, which finds a niche of favor in so many hearts for duellists. In a word, intrepidity, deny it who may, is the trait which finds more universal favor with human nature in general than any other. Why? Because we are weak and frail beings, exposed to innumerable pains and dangers; and the quality we most frequently need, is courage. Without it life is a living death, a long agony of fear. With it, we die but once, enduring at the most but a momentary pang, never anticipated, never embittering a moment in advance with imaginary suffering.

We have no hesitation in affirming, that it would be no more difficult to educate the coming generation of civilized people to this spirit, than it is to impart it to the whole race of males among the red men. However inferior we may count these people, in comparison with ourselves in other respects, they have at least one manifest advantage over us; they never torment themselves, because they know they must die.

But we are told that the actual possession of this spirit would produce such a recklessness of life, that the great ends of Providence would be defeated; and people would expose themselves to death with so little concern, that the race would waste away and become extinct. We never need combat a theory, an abstract opinion, when the case can be settled by a fact. Is it so with the warriors of the red men? On the contrary, can another people be found so wary, so adroit to evade, or resist danger, so fertile in expedients to save life? The coward of their number meets the death he would fly; and the intrepid warrior puts forth all the resources of his instinctive sagacity, all his keen and practised discernment, to discover the best means of evasion. If he must meet that death, which his skill cannot evade, nor his powers resist, he instantly settles down upon the resource of his invincible heroism of endurance.

In fact, one of the direct fruits of the intrepidity we would wish to see universal, is, that it will give its possessor all possible chances for preserving health and life. It saves him from the influence of fear, a passion among the most debilitating, and adverse to life, of any to which our nature is subject. Braced by his courage, he passes untouched amidst a contagious epidemic, to which the timid and apprehensive nature falls a victim. In danger it gives him coolness and self-command, to discover, and avail himself of all his chances of wise resistance, or probable escape. In sickness, he has all the aids to recover, which nature allows, in being delivered from the most dangerous symptom in innumerable maladies, the debilitating persuasion of the patient, that he shall not rise from his sickness. In a word, the direct reverse of the charge is the fact. The wise and enlightened fearlessness, which I consider it so important to acquire, is in every way as much the preserver of life, as it is indispensable to happiness; as cowardice proverbially runs in the face of the hideous monster that it creates.

5. The fact, that an evil is felt to be alleviated, which is shared in common with all around us, has been generally recognised, though this perverted sympathy has been traced to the basest selfishness, by a humiliating analysis of our nature, which I have neither space nor inclination to develope. We all know, that the same person, who is most beneficent, most active in his benevolence, and large in his wishes to do good, would shrink from a great calamity, which he saw himself destined to encounter, for the first and the last among his whole race. But inform him, that by an impartial award he shares it in common with all his kind, and you reconcile him at once to his lot. Whether the spirit of his resignation in this case be pure, or polluted in its origin, it is not my present purpose to inquire. It is sufficient to be assured, that there is such a feeling deeply inherent in human nature. The suffering patient, as he lays himself down to part from all friends, to be severed from all ties, to see the green earth, the bright sun, and the visible heavens no more, and to be conscious, that the everlasting circle of ages will continue its revolutions without ever bringing him back to the forsaken scene, cannot repine, that he has been put upon this bitter trial alone. He must be deeply conscious, view it in what aspect he may, that it presents no new harshness nor horror to him. Of all the countless millions, that have passed away, and been replaced by others, like the vernal leaves, death has stood before every solitary individual of the mighty mass, the same phantom king of terrors. Each has contemplated the same inexorable, irreversible award, been held in the same suspense of hopes, and fears, and compelled to endure the same struggles. Looking upon the immense mortal drama of ages, the actors seem slowly and imperceptibly to enter, and depart from the scene. But in the lapse of one short age, the hopes, fears, loves and hatreds of all the countless millions have vanished, to be replaced by those of another generation. The heart swells at the recollection how much each of these mortals must have endured, in this stern and inevitable encounter, as measured by our own suffering in the same case. It is only necessary for the patient to extend his vision a few years in advance of his own decease; and his friends, his children, his visitants, all that surround him, will in their turn recline on the same bed. Who cannot feel the palpable folly of repining at an evil shared with all, that have been, are, or will be!

‘Not to thy eternal resting place,
Shalt thou retire alone: * *
* * Thou shalt lie down
With patriarchs of the infant world, with kings,
The powerful of the earth, the wise, the good,
Fair forms and hoary seers of ages past,
All in one mighty sepulchre. The hills,
Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun; the vales
Stretching in pensive quietness between;
The venerable woods, rivers, that move
In majesty, and the complaining brooks,
That make the meadows green, and, poured round all,
Old ocean’s gray and melancholy waste,
Are but the solemn decorations all
Of the great tomb of man.’

6. Philosophers and moralists will readily admit, that the only easy and adequate remedy for the fear of death is the hope of immortality. On the other hand, they, whose vocation it is to question and decry the aids, which reason and philosophy offer in the case, as sullen, cold, stoical, will not deny, that ‘innumerable’ examples have been offered in all countries, and in all time, of men, who, in virtue of no higher discipline than that of reason and philosophy, have met death with such unshrinking and invincible firmness, as could hardly have been rendered more illustrious by any additional motives. They have shown, beyond all question, that nature has furnished us with a power of resistance, which, when rightly called forth, enables us to triumph over fear and death. The pagans of ancient story, the unbelieving of christian lands, the red men of our forests, offer us demonstrations to any extent. I am aware, in what places this simplest of all truths is weakly denied. Those, for whom I write, are of the number who exact the truth; and I have no fear to declare it; nor would I contend for a moment with such as deny this fact.

But I am not the less sensible, that the triumph, in these cases, is bitter and painful. It can only be obtained by a violence done to instinctive nature, connected with innumerable revulsions and horrors, and to all those ineffable clingings to earth, and shrinkings from the first step into the unknown land, that are partly the heritage of nature, and partly the result of the concurrent influence of all our institutions. It is a violence to all the passions, affections, hopes and fears fostered by the earth. But the victory has been wrought, and can be wrought, even though the bosom, in which it is wrought become as of iron.

But the same triumph is won by the hope of immortality, by a process, simple, easy, natural, in entire consonance with the most tender affections and lively sympathies of flesh and blood. We lie down in pain and agony, with a spirit of easy endurance, if we have a confident persuasion that, during the night, we shall have shaken off the cause of our sufferings, and shall rise to renewed health and freshness in the morning. Death can bring little terror to him, who believes that its darkness will instantly be replaced by the light of another scene: and that the separation from friends in the visible land, is only rejoining the more numerous group, who have already become citizens of the invisible country.

To what extent am I the subject of this hope myself; and whence do I derive my belief? These are questions which affection will ask; and the answers, if devoid of interest _now_, will not be so when the _memory of things that were shall come over the mind of the reader like a cloud_, and when read as the thoughts of one, who, during his whole sojourn, felt and reflected intensely upon those subjects; and who will then himself have passed away to the experience of all that which is here matter of discussion. Those most dear to me will know what relations I sustained to these subjects, during the best part of my life; and will not be without solicitude to know my final thoughts upon them; thoughts, purified at least from all stain of party interest and _esprit du corps_, and put forth in the simple consciousness of my own convictions, however they may be powerless to produce belief in the mind of any other. With the fierce war cry of sects in religion, in their acrimonious and never ending contests about abstract terms without a meaning, their combats about the vague and technical phrases of formulas of faith, I have long since had nothing to do. For many years they have rung on my ear like the distant thunder of clouds that have passed by. To the denunciations of those, who assume to hold all truth imprisoned in their articles of confession, if I might hope the distinction of receiving them, I am perfectly callous. Neither would I desire to add another book to the millions of volumes of polemic theology which already exist, and which have as little bearing upon the knowledge, virtue and happiness of the age, as the last year’s snow.

We are, after all, unconsciously influenced, and that in no slight degree, by authority, however humble may be its claims, as a test of truth. How did such a person believe on such a point? Many a young aspirant suspends his opinion, until he hears; and settles into fixed persuasion afterwards. How many are there, in christian lands especially, who have never had a wandering or unbelieving doubt of the soul’s immortality float over their minds? How many, who have had no terrene and gross ideas, influenced by seeing the tenement of flesh, by which all that was called the mind and the soul stood visible to the eye, and tangible to the thought, yielded up to consumption and decay? This is a question which no one can answer for another. For myself, I believe unhesitatingly, and with no stain of doubt, that I shall, in some way, exactly provided for by Him who made me, exist after death, as simply conscious, that I am the same person, as I am now in the morning, that I slept at night. Do I derive this conviction from books and reasonings? I am by no means sure that I do; though the gospel assuredly speaks directly to my heart. I do ready homage to the talents and learning of Clarke, Locke, Paley, Channing and a cloud of reasoning witnesses, of whom every Christian may well be proud; and, most of all, to the profound and admirable Butler.

I hear the author of our faith directly declaring a resurrection and immortality. A single assertation from such a source were enough. But I find him reasoning, and insisting less upon the fact, than I should have expected, had he intended to implant it in the mind, as it were a truth, chiefly to be apprehended by the understanding. It seems to me that he so discusses it, as one who was aware that it was already inwoven in the sentiments and hearts of his hearers, vague, dark, without moral consequence, it may be; but an existing sentiment, taken for granted, upon which he might predicate his doctrines, as upon a thousand other facts, which we can clearly perceive, he considers already admitted by his hearers.

Let a man walk in the fields on a June morning after night showers. Let him seat himself for meditation on the hill-side, under the grateful canopy of foliage. Let him ask himself to embody his conceptions of the divinity, and to give form and place to the Author of the glorious scene outstretched before him. He may have just risen from reading the admirable demonstrations of Clarke, and the astronomical sermons of Chalmers. He may concentrate his conceptions by a fixedness of study, that may amount to pain. He may bewilder his faculties, in attempting to embody something, that his thoughts and reasonings can grasp. I know not what the powers of others can achieve in this case. But I know, by painful experiment, what mine cannot. I ask my understanding and reasoning powers about this glorious Being. They inform me that it is a subject that comes not within their purview. They can follow the chain of reasoning, see that every link is complete, and the demonstration irresistible. But when they wish to avail themselves of their new truth, they have no distinct idea either of premises or conclusion. It has evaporated in the analysis.

I ask my heart, or the source of my moral sentiment, be it what it may, the same question. The grateful verdure, the matin freshness, the glad voices, the aroma of flowers, the earth, the rolling clouds, the sun, all the lamps, that will burn in the firmament by night, my own happy consciousness in witnessing this impressive scene, cry out _a God_. To my heart, it is the first, the simplest, most obvious thought, presenting itself, it seems to me, as soon as the consciousness of my own existence; certainly susceptible of as little doubt. I have no need to define, analyze, embody. The moment I attempt to do it, my thoughts are vague and unsettled. I yield myself to the conviction. My heart swells with gratitude, confidence, love. So good, so beneficent a Being can do nothing but good, in this or any other world, to him who loves and trusts him, and strives to obey his laws.

My most treasured hopes of immortality are from the same source. Will this conscious being, capable of such remote excursions into the two eternities between which its existence is suspended, live beyond the present life? Not a particle of matter, for ought that appears, can be annihilated. Will the nobler thoughts, the warmer affections perish, as though they had not been? We ask our senses, and they can give us no hope. The body lives, and we speak of it as including the conscious being. We see it die, pass under the empire of corruption, molder, and incorporate with its kindred elements. The sensible evidence, that the person exists, is entirely destroyed. The most insatiate appetite of our natures, however, craves continued existence, and ceases not to seek for it. The inquirer after immortality cannot but be in earnest in this pursuit. The arguments of the venerable sages of old are spread before him. From the soul’s nature, from the unity of consciousness, the incorruptibility of thought, the everlasting progress, of which our faculties are capable, the strong and unquenchable desire of posthumous fame, the sacredness of earthly friendships, and similar arguments, they strove to establish, on the basis of reasoning, the conviction of immortality.

From these reasonings he repairs to the Scriptures. A strange book, utterly unlike any writings that had appeared before, declares that we shall exist forever. The religion which has arisen from this book, in its whole structure and dispensation, is predicated on the assumed fact, that we shall exist forever in another life, happy or miserable, according to our deeds on earth. Jesus, _the author and finisher of this faith_, announces himself _the resurrection and the life_; with a voice of power calls his dead friend from the tomb; declares, that death has no power over himself; that, after suffering a violent death, on the third day from that event, he shall arise from the dead. He arises, according to his promise; and, in the midst of his awe-struck friends he visibly ascends to his own celestial sphere. Millions, as by one impulse, catch the spirit of this wonderful book--love each other with anew and single-hearted affection, as unlike the spirit of all former ties of kindness and love, as the doctrines of this religion are different from those of paganism. The new sect look with a careless eye upon whatever is transitory; and will submit to privation, derision and torture, of whatever form, rather than waver, or equivocate, in declaring themselves subjects of this hope of immortality. This Christian hope, in every period from the time of its author, has made its way to the heart of millions, who have laid themselves down on their last bed, and felt the approach of their last sleep, expecting, as confidently to open their eyes on an eternal morning, as the weary laborer, at his evening rest, trusts that he shall see the brightness of the morrow’s dawn.

I recur, with new and unsated satisfaction, to these arguments for the soul’s immortality. I love to evoke the venerable shades of Socrates and Plato and Cicero, and hear them, each in his own way, persuade himself, that the thoughts and affections, of which he was conscious, could only belong to an immortal spirit. I listen to the eloquent and impressive apostrophe of Tacitus, to the conscious spirit of him, whose life he had so charmingly delineated, with feelings which I cannot well describe.

‘Si quis piorum manibus locus; si, ut sapientibus placet, non cum corpore extinguontur magnæ animæ, placide quiescas; nosque, domum tuam, ab infirmo desiderio, et muliebribus lamentis, ad contemplationem virtutum tuarum voces, quas neque lugeri, neque plangi fas est: admiratione te potius temporalibus laudibus, et, si natura suppeditet, similitudine decoremus.’[H]

I repair with new confidence and hope to the gospel, and strive to imbibe the cheering conviction, as I hear Paul sublimely declare, _that this corruptible shall put on incorruption, and this mortal immortality, and that death shall be swallowed up in victory_.

I have no disposition to deny that these arguments would be, in themselves, insufficient to turn the balance against the evidence of the senses, and produce the conviction of immortality from the deductions of simple reason, if religion were an impression to be raised and sustained by argument. But, if we are religious, in some form, from our very constitution, if immortality be felt as a sentiment, with more or less clearness and force, I deem that these arguments have their appropriate effect, in giving form and direction to this interior sentiment; that believers have been such, because these doctrines have found a concurrent sympathy in their spirit, a suitableness to the wants of their heart, a development of the germ of their hopes. It seems to me, that whoever has a heart, cannot look upon the earth and the firmament, without exclaiming ‘there is a God,’ nor within himself, without a conviction, that his soul is immortal.

I see in the enthusiasm,--the embraces, cries, tears, swoonings and the revolting extravagances of various sects under the influence of high religious excitement, nothing more than the morbid development of this latent religious sentiment. Instead of being, as scoffers affirm, subjects of a mere factitious intoxication, these people, who seem only to demand wings, to soar aloft, are only manifesting the unregulated action of nature working at the bottom of their hearts.

For myself I feel that I am immortal, and that those fellow sojourners, to whom I have been attached by the affection of long intimacy, and the reception of many and great kindnesses, will exist with me hereafter. I pretend to conceive nothing, I wish to inquire nothing, about the mode, the place and circumstances. I should as soon think of disturbing myself, by endeavoring to conceive the ideas that might be imparted by a sixth sense. It is sufficient that my heart declares, that a being who has seen this glorious world, cherished these warm affections, entertained these illimitable aspirations, felt these longings after immortality, indulged ‘_these thoughts, that wander through eternity_,’ _cannot_ have been doomed by Him, who gave them, to have them quenched forever in annihilation. Even an illusion so glorious would be worth purchasing at the price of a world. I would affirm, even to repetition, that there is given us that high and stern power, which implies a courage superior to any conflict, and which gives the mind a complete ascendency over any danger, pain or torture, which belongs to life or death. But we would not be so extravagant, as for a moment, to question that death, as the present generation have been trained, and as we are accustomed, by all we see, and hear to view it, is a formidable evil, fitly characterized by its dread name, _the king of terrors_. Many a debilitating interior misgiving will assail the stoutest mind, in certain moments, in view of it. There are dark intervals by night, in the midnight hours of pain, periods between the empire of sleep and active reason, when the terrific and formless image rushes in its terror and indefiniteness upon the mind. As age steals upon us, and the vivid perceptions, and the bright dreams of youth disappear, many a dark shadow will cloud the sunshine of the soul. The conflict, in which all these terrors are overcome by unaided nature and reason is, as has been seen, a cruel one. The tender sensibilities, the keen affections, the dear and delusive hopes of our nature must all be crushed, before we can be unmoved in the endurance of the pain and torture that precede, and the death that follows.

It is only to a firm and unhesitating faith, that it becomes as easy and natural to die, as to sleep. Glorious and blessed hope, the hope of meeting our friends, in the eternal land of those who truly and greatly live forever! There we shall renew our youth, and _mount as on the wings of eagles_.