is to us, while we live, what we think it to be. If we
confront it with analytic and defiant eye, it is that nothing
which ever ceases in beginning to be. If, letting the
superstitious senses tyrannize over us and cow our better part of
man, we crouch before the imagination of it, it assumes the shape
of the skeleton monarch who takes the world for his empire, the
electric fluid for his chariot, and time for his sceptre. In the
contemplation of death, hitherto, fancy inspired by fear has been
by far too much the prominent faculty and impulse. The literature
of the subject is usually ghastly, appalling, and absurd, with
point of view varying from that of the credulous Hindu,
personifying death as a monster with a million mouths devouring
all creatures and licking them in his flaming lips as a fire
devours the moths or as the sea swallows the torrents,18 to that
of the atheistic German dreamer, who converts nature into an
immeasurable corpse worked by galvanic forces, and that of the
bold French philosopher, Carnot, whose speculations have led to
the theory that the sun will finally expend all its heat, and
constellated life cease, as the solar system hangs, like a dead
orrery, ashy and spectral, the ghost of what it was. So the
extravagant author of Festus says,

"God tore the glory from the sun's broad brow And flung the
flaming scalp away."

The subject should be viewed by the unclouded intellect, guided by
serene faith, in the light of scientific knowledge. Then death is
revealed, first, as an organic necessity in the primordial life
cell; secondly, as the cessation of a given form of life in its
completion; thirdly, as a benignant law, an expression of the
Creator's love; fourthly, as the inaugurating condition of another
form of life. What we are to refer to sin is all the seeming
lawlessness and untimeliness of death. Had not men sinned, all
would reach a good age and pass away without suffering. Death is
benignant necessity; the irregularity and pain associated with it
are an inherited punishment. Finally, it is a condition of
improvement in life. Death is the incessant touch with which the
artist, Nature, is bringing her works to perfection.

Physical death is experienced by man in common with the brute.
Upon grounds of physiology there is no greater evidence for man's
Spiritual survival through that overshadowed crisis than there is
for the brute's. And on grounds of sentiment man ought not to
shrink from