e thing worth living for or thinking about.
_Homo liber de nulla re minus quam de morte cogitat_. We do not set
about digging our graves, we do not carry our coffins about with us,
still less do we sleep in them--a gruesome practice which has attracted
some fanatical folk. To us, death is a fact, not an effect, an
incident as natural as birth, in no wise affecting the real, the
spiritual, man. We therefore utterly disavow all sympathy with the
groundless assumption that a magical change comes over the psychical
powers of a man at that supreme moment, whereby he can do no more good,
but may harden into a more hopeless reprobate. The notion that a
judgment of the soul takes place, as in the hall of Osiris, of Egyptian
mythology, at the instant of dissolution, whereby the destiny of the
individual is sealed for ever, we repudiate in terms. Man is judged,
not then, but at every moment of his life. "The moral laws vindicate
themselves" without the intervention of any external tribunal. And,
therefore, the eternal progress of the man in us is maintained
uninterruptedly across the gloomy chasm of death, under other
circumstances, no doubt, but still it is the same ceaseless approach
towards the Infinite Ideal, the same untiring journey along "the
everlasting way". All are in that "way," we may be sure, even those
whom we foolishly deem hopelessly reprobate. Something can be made of
those failures of men, for

After last returns the first, though a wide compass
round be fetched;
What began best can't end worst, nor what God once
blest prove accurst.

But such men, the Neros, Caligulas, the Wainwrights and Palmers of all
ages and nations, are but a fractional, an infinitesimal, element in
the great human family. _Sanabiles fecit nationes super terram_. "He
hath made earth's peoples to be healed;" they shall redeem _themselves_
one day. The moment of awakening comes sooner or later to all; there
is an unextinguished capacity for good under the sores and scars of the
most dissolute life, and we may believe that awakening comes when the
spirit enters new-born, as it were, into a world where the illusions of
the flesh, the deceptions of the sense, obtain no more.

There are no final, irredeemable failures. The Divine in man must
emerge one day; its glory pierce through the gloom of his sin and
shame, and transfigure him anew after the beautiful and pathetic image
of the holy Christ in the legend,[1