t you do not know what is before your friend--that it is
a "leap off into the dark"? Have we not learned from Scripture already
that it is much less of "dark" than come of us thought? And may it not
be much less of a "leap off" than we think--only a closing of the eyes
here and an opening of them there? May not the birth into that life be
as simple as the birth into this? May not our fright be like that of
Don Quixote when blind-folded he hung by his wrist from the stable
window and they told him that a tremendous abyss yawned beneath him.
He is in terror of the awful fall. Maritornes cuts the thong with
gladsome laughter and the gallant gentleman falls--just four inches!
May we not believe that God reserves just as blithesome a surprise for
us when our time comes to discover the simplicity, the agreeableness,
the absence of any serious change in what we call dying. I am not
ignoring the pain and sickness of the usual death-bed. But these are
not dying? The act of dying comes after these. These are but the
birth pangs before the new life begins, the rough, hard bit of road
that leads to "the wicket gate out of the city."

Pliny, from much clinical observations, declares his opinion that death
itself is pleasure rather than pain. Dr. Solander was delighted at the
sensation of dying in the snow. The late Archbishop of Canterbury
remarked as he died: "It is really nothing much after all." Dying
itself may be pleasure rather than pain.

We have all noticed that expression of composed calm which comes on the
faces of the newly dead. Some say it is only due to muscular
relaxation. Perhaps so. But perhaps not. One likes to think that it
may be something more. Who knows that it may not be a last message of
content and acquiescence from those departing souls who at the moment
of departure know perhaps a little more than ourselves--a message of
good cheer and pleasant promise by no means to be disregarded.[1]

At any rate does not Scripture suggest to us in the story of
Lazarus--of Moses and Elias at the Transfiguration--of the dying
thief--of the spirits in the Unseen Life whom Christ visited at His
death--that Death comes not as an executioner to cut off our departed
one from life and love, but rather as God's good angel bringing him
more than life has ever brought, and leading him by a path as full of
miracles of soft arrangement as was his birth to heights of ever
advancing existence.

God reveals to us t