ildren; and children their parents. This is equally true in
every comparison and degree of relationship. Features and
characteristics undergo such a decided change and transformation that
recognition is ofttimes even impossible. Even the law courts are
continually called upon to determine the proper identity of persons, to
establish the ownership of property by other means than by personal
identification. Most remarkable of all, under new conditions, we do not
recognize ourselves within the interval of only a few seconds!

Try this if you would seek proof, and convince yourself that recognition
of your own personality is momentarily impossible, and that you must
resort to other senses than that of sight to identify yourself.

Put a wig upon your head, blacken your face, "make up" your features,
and when you have finished and are completely unaware of your changed
appearance, look into the mirror for your reflection and feel the
sensation of the startling fact that you know not yourself.

We speak of changes so radical in a person's appearance that we often
say we could not recognize him "in a thousand years."

What a ridiculous presumption it is, then, to maintain that we live
after death when _all_ senses are gone and perception is dead!

Again, how anyone can say that when we die we go to "heaven" is too
childish to consider, because when we die, instead of going up and to
heaven, we are put deep into the ground to moulder and to rot away.

What a far-fetched conclusion it is to assume that we live after death,
minus all the physical characteristics and under conditions utterly
incomprehensible to our minds! Even if, at death, the body turned into
invisible gases it would mean and prove absolutely nothing.

If we live after death, by what means can one person communicate with
another?

We cannot feel, because we have no hands.

We cannot see, because we have no eyes.

We cannot smell, because we have no nose.

We cannot hear, because we have no ears.

We cannot taste, because we have no mouth, no stomach.

But, with it all, these five mediums of sense are dependent upon a
_living brain_.

The fact that we suffer the loss of our senses even before death,
because of the complications in the make-up of our body, should be
sufficient proof of the nonexistence of a soul and the utter
impossibility of a life after death.

Unless we retain and maintain our sacred ties after death, another life
is valueless