rtures of the damned, all the vital cells of
the most skeptical among us are still steeped in the appalling mystery
of the Hebrew Sheol, the pagan Hades, or the Christian Hell. Though it
may no longer be lighted by very definite flames, the gulf still opens
at the end of life, and, if less known, is all the more formidable.
And, therefore, when the impending hour strikes to which we dared not
raise our eyes, everything fails us at the same time. Those two or
three uncertain ideas whereon, without examining them, we had meant to
lean, give way like rushes beneath the weight of the last moments. In
vain we seek a refuge among reflections that rave or are strange to us
and do not know the roads to our heart. No one awaits us on the last
shore where all is unprepared, where naught remains afoot save terror.

III

WE MUST ENLIGHTEN AND ESTABLISH
OUR IDEA OF DEATH

It were a salutary thing for each of us to work out his idea of death
in the light of his days and the strength of his intelligence and to
learn to stand by it. He would say to death:

"I know not who you are, or I would be your master; but, in days when
my eyes saw clearer than to-day, I learnt what you are not: that is
enough to prevent you from becoming my master."

He would thus carry, imprinted on his memory, a tried image
against which the last agony would not prevail and in which the
phantom-stricken eyes would take fresh comfort. Instead of the
terrible prayer of the dying, which is the prayer of the depths, he
would say his own prayer, that of the peaks of his life, where would
be gathered, like angels of peace, the most limpid, the most pellucid
thoughts of his life. Is not that the prayer of prayers? After all,
what is a true and worthy prayer, if not the most ardent and
disinterested effort to reach and grasp the unknown?

IV

WE MUST RID DEATH OF THAT
WHICH GOES BEFORE

"The doctors and the priests," said Napoleon, "have long been making
death grievous."

Let us, then, learn to look upon it as it is in itself, free from the
horrors of matter and stripped of the terrors of the imagination. Let
us first get rid of all that goes before and does not belong to it.
Thus, we impute to it the tortures of the last illness; and that is
not right. Illnesses have nothing in common with that which ends them.
They form part of life and not of death. We easily forget the most
cruel sufferings that restore us to health; and the first