no longer descend,
whereas it is always possible for us to rise; for the dead, whatever
they have been in life, become better than the best of us. The least
worthy of them, in shedding the body, have shed its vices, its
littlenesses, its weaknesses, which soon pass from our memory as well;
and the spirit alone remains, which is pure in every man and able to
desire only what is good. There are no wicked dead because there are
no wicked souls. This is why, as we purify ourselves, we restore life
to those who were no more and transform our memory, which they
inhabit, into heaven.

2

And what was always true of all the dead is far more true to-day when
only the best are chosen for the tomb. In the region which we believe
to be under the earth, which we call the kingdom of the shades and
which in reality is the ethereal region and the kingdom of light,
there are at this moment perturbations no less profound than those
which we are experiencing on the surface of our earth. The young dead
are invading it from every side; and since the beginning of this world
they have never been so numerous, so full of energy and zeal. Whereas
in the customary sequence of the years the dwelling-place of those who
leave us receives only weary and exhausted lives, there is not one in
this incomparable host who, to borrow Pericles' expression, "has not
departed from life at the height of glory." Not one of them but has
gone up, not down, to his death clad in the greatest sacrifice that
man can make for an idea which cannot die. All that we have hitherto
believed, all that we have striven to attain beyond ourselves, all
that has lifted us to the level at which we stand, all that has
overcome the evil days and the evil instincts of human nature: all
this could have been no more than lies and illusions if such men as
these, such a mass of merit and of glory, were really annihilated, had
really forever disappeared, were forever useless and voiceless,
forever without influence in a world to which they have given life.

3

It is hardly possible that this could be so as regards the external
survival of the dead; but it is absolutely certain that it is not so
as regards their survival in ourselves. Here nothing is lost and no
one perishes. Our memories are to-day peopled by a multitude of heroes
struck down in the flower of their youth and very different from the
pale and languid cohort of the past, composed almost wholly of the
sick and the