ace to
face with death, hide from him the hour of his going like a criminal
who knows not the hour of his execution; to allow the old to live
till they are withered, shrivelled and helpless, a burden to others
and a still greater burden to themselves, cursing the fact they must
live and yet afraid to die; to take a young man in the splendour of
his youth, on the threshold of assured success, snatch him away
without warning from the parents devoted to him, the wife who loves
him and the children dependent on him; and then leave them both, the
decrepit and useless old and the needed young to drop into the
tongueless silence of the grave, that silence broken only by the
sound of the clods as they fall on the coffin lid or the plash of
tears, or the choking sob; to allow the living whose hearts are torn
and twisted and smashed by the robbery that death brings upon them
to stand there and strangle themselves with the unanswered and
unanswerable questions: "Whence," "What," and "Whither," and then
say all this is the work of a good, a compassionate, a tender and
loving God, and that death is as natural as birth?

Nay!

Those who say and teach that death is as natural as birth are guilty
of pure unintellectualism and are unwarranted deniers of the facts.

The birth of a child is like the coming of the dawn. It is like the
note of a new and joyous song. It is the revelation of a new world,
a world of life, of hope, of promised and larger activities. No one
who is sane and true and wise will deliberately seek to hinder
birth; but death! ah! everything is against death and by right
against it.

Every fibre in the body repudiates death. Pain is the protest of
life against it and the scout that brings in news of its approach.
The brain, the mind, the heart shiver at it, not merely because of
the native fear at the unknown, but at the mockery it makes of life,
the uselessness of living a time, at the longest, so brief, so full
of disappointment and bitterness, a life where plans are never
accomplished nor hopes fulfilled, where tears and sorrow outweigh
laughter and song.

Every remedy taken from materia medica, every operation of the
surgeon's knife that adds even a day to the sufferer's existence,
every hospital, every precaution and invention to prevent accident,
all the genius exercised by man to conserve health and strength are
a protest against death and a proclamation that it is unnatural, a
discord and a wrong.

Ev