fit them, each according to his measure,
for the final salvation for which he may be qualified in that home where
"there are many mansions."

When then does this purification begin? Does it begin with dying? That
has been already disproved. But so prevalent is the popular belief that
dying has a kind of cleansing power in itself, that it is well to touch
upon it once more. What is dying? It is simply the parting of the soul
from the body. The soul, up to the moment of death, dwells in the body.
At death, in a moment it ceases to dwell in the body. But have not the
pain, it may be asked, and the very agony of dying a chastening and
purifying force, serving in themselves to crown repentance, and to
achieve, in the instant, the complete cleansing of the soul? Why should
it be so? The pains which precede death are distinct from dying, from
what we may call the act of dying. The act of dying is instantaneous. It
is the moment, the crisis at which the soul takes its flight. The pains
and agony which accompany the process leading up to death are not the
pains and agony of dying at all. They are felt while the sick man is
still living. They belong to his life, not to his death. At the moment
of dying the sufferings are probably over. The body has just felt its
last throb of sensible anguish, and, in the crisis of the soul's
departure, is incapable of feeling pain, and therefore is incapable of
the discipline of pain. And it is the discipline of pain alone that has
any cleansing power. And the discipline of pain went on in life up to
the moment, if it be so, of the dying, and then ceased. But it belonged,
as the pain belonged, to the life, and not to the death. During the
life, at many times in the life past, the wholesome discipline of pain
may or may not have been working a salutary change in the character, up
to the very moment, perhaps, of death. But it ceased, as the pain
ceased, at death.

This then we conclude, that the act of dying in itself, apart from the
pain which may have preceded it, can have no moral effect, or work any
moral change. Moral change, that is to say change of character, can only
go on in life. Dying is a physical operation, not a moral act. At death
the possibility of change of character has stopped, so far as this life
can be the sphere of it. Life, not death, may be accompanied by
cleansing, life on this side of death, and life on the other side of
death, but not death, wh