It is easy to conceive circumstances not widely different from those of actual life that would, if not altogether, at least very largely, take from death the gloom that commonly surrounds it. If all the members of the human race died either before two or after seventy; if death was in all cases the swift and painless thing that it is with many; and if the old man always left behind him children to perpetuate his name, his memory, and his thoughts, Death, though it might still seem a sad thing, would certainly not excite the feelings it now so often produces. Of all the events that befall us, it is that which owes most of its horror not to itself, but to its accessories, its associations, and to the imaginations that cluster around it. 'Death,' indeed, as a great stoical moralist said, 'is the only evil that can never touch us. When we are, death is not. When death comes, we are not.'

The composition of treatises of consolation intended to accustom men to contemplate death without terror was one of the favourite exercises of the philosophers in the Augustan and in the subsequent periods of Pagan Rome. The chapter which Cicero has devoted to this subject in his treatise on old age is a beautiful example of how it appeared to a virtuous pagan, who believed in a future life which would bring him into communion with those whom he had loved and lost on earth, but who at the same time recognised this only as a probability, not a certainty. "Death," he said, 'is an event either utterly to be disregarded if it extinguish the soul's existence, or much to be wished if it convey her to some region where she shall continue to exist for ever. One of these two consequences must necessarily follow the disunion of soul and body; there is no other possible alternative. What then have I to fear if after death I shall either not be miserable or shall certainly be happy?'

Vague notions, however, of a dim, twilight, shadowy world where the ghosts of the dead lived a faint and joyless existence, and whence they sometimes returned to haunt the living in their dreams, were widely spread through the popular imaginations, and it was as the extinction of all superstitious fears that the school of Lucretius and Pliny welcomed the belief that all things ended with death—'Post mortem nihil est, ipsaque mors nihil.' Nor is it by any means certain that even in the school of Plato the thought of another life had a great and operative influence on minds and characters. Death was chiefly represented as rest; as the close of a banquet; as the universal law of nature which befalls all living beings, though the immense majority encounter it at an earlier period than man. It was thought of simply as sleep—dreamless, undisturbed sleep—the final release from all the sorrows, sufferings, anxieties, labours, and longings of life.

It is a strange thing to observe to what a height not only of moral excellence, but also of devotional fervour, men have arisen without any assistance from the doctrine of a future life. Only the faintest and most dubious glimmer of such a belief can be traced in the Psalms, in which countless generations of Christians have found the fullest expression of their devotional feelings, or in the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, which are perhaps the purest product of pagan piety.

As I have already said, I am endeavouring in this book to steer clear of questions of contested theologies; but it is impossible to avoid noticing the great changes that have been introduced into the conception of death by some of the teaching which in different forms has grown up under the name of Christianity, though much of it may be traced in germ to earlier periods of human development. Death in itself was made incomparably more terrible by the notion that it was not a law but a punishment; that sufferings inconceivably greater than those of Earth awaited the great masses of the human race beyond the grave; that an event which was believed to have taken place ages before we were born, or small frailties such as the best of us cannot escape, were sufficient to bring men under this condemnation; that the only paths to safety were to be found in ecclesiastical ceremonies; in the assistance of priests; in an accurate choice among competing theological doctrines. At the same time the largest and most powerful of the Churches of Christendom has, during many centuries, done its utmost to intensify the natural fear of death by associating it in the imaginations of men with loathsome images and appalling surroundings. There can be no greater contrast than that between the Greek tomb with its garlands of flowers, its bright, youthful and restful imagery, and the mortuary chapels that may often be found in Catholic countries, with their ghastly pictures of the saved souls writhing in purgatorial flames, while the inscription above and the moneybox below point out the one means of alleviating their lot.

This is one side of the picture. On the other hand it cannot be questioned that the strong convictions and impressive ceremonies, even of the most superstitious faith, have consoled and strengthened multitudes in their last moments, and in the purer and more enlightened forms of Christianity death now wears a very different aspect from what it did in the teaching of mediÆval Catholicism, or of some of the sects that grew out of the Reformation. Human life ending in the weakness of old age and in the corruption of the tomb will always seem a humiliating anti-climax, and often a hideous injustice. The belief in the rightful supremacy of conscience, and in an eternal moral law redressing the many wrongs and injustices of life, and securing the ultimate triumph of good over evil; the incapacity of earth and earthly things to satisfy our cravings and ideals; the instinctive revolt of human nature against the idea of annihilation, and its capacity for affections and attachments, which seem by their intensity to transcend the limits of earth and carry with them in moments of bereavement a persuasion or conviction of something that endures beyond the grave,—all these things have found in Christian beliefs a sanction and a satisfaction that men had failed to find in Socrates or Cicero, or in the vague Pantheism to which unassisted reason naturally inclines.

Looking, however, on death in its purely human aspects, the mourner should consider how often in a long illness he wished the dying man could sleep; how consoling to his mind was the thought of every hour of peaceful rest; of every hour in which the patient was withdrawn from consciousness, insensible to suffering, removed for a time from the miseries of a dying life. He should ask himself whether these intervals of insensibility were not on the whole the happiest in the illness—those which he would most have wished to multiply or to prolong. He should accustom himself, then, to think of death as sleep—undisturbed sleep—the only sleep from which man never wakes to pain.

You find yourself in the presence of what is a far deeper and more poignant trial than an old man's death—a young life cut off in its prime; the eclipse of a sun before the evening has arrived. Accustom yourself to consider the life that has passed as a whole. A human being has been called into the world—has lived in it ten, twenty, thirty years. It seems to you an intolerable instance of the injustice of fate that he is so early cut off. Estimate, then, that life as a whole, and ask yourself whether, so judged, it has been a blessing or the reverse. Count up the years of happiness. Count up the days, or perhaps weeks, of illness and of pain. Measure the happiness that this short life has given to some who have passed away; who never lived to see its early close. Balance the happiness which during its existence it gave to those who survived, with the poignancy and the duration of pain caused by the loss. Here, for example, is one who lived perhaps twenty-five years in health and vigour; whose life during that period was chequered by no serious misfortune; whose nature, though from time to time clouded by petty anxieties and cares, was on the whole bright, buoyant, and happy; who had the capacity of vivid enjoyment and many opportunities of attaining it; who felt all the thrill of health and friendship and ecstatic pleasure. Then came a change,—a year or two with a crippled wing—life, though not abjectly wretched, on the whole a burden, and then the end. You can easily conceive—you can ardently desire—a better lot, but judge fairly the lights and shades of what has been. Does not the happiness on the whole exceed the evil? Can you honestly say that this life has been a curse and not a blessing?—that it would have been better if it had never been called out of nothingness?—that it would have been better if the drama had never been played? It is over now. As you lay in his last home the object of so much love, ask yourself whether, even in a mere human point of view, this parenthesis between two darknesses has not been on the whole productive of more happiness than pain to him and to those around him.

It was an ancient saying that 'he whom the gods love dies young,' and more than one legend representing speedy and painless death as the greatest of blessings has descended to us from pagan antiquity; while other legends, like that of Tithonus, anticipated the picture which Swift has so powerfully but so repulsively drawn of the misery of old age and its infirmities, if death did not come as a release. I have elsewhere related an old Irish legend embodying this truth. 'In a certain lake in Munster, it is said, there were two islands; into the first death could never enter, but age and sickness, and the weariness of life and the paroxysms of fearful suffering were all known there, and they did their work till the inhabitants, tired of their immortality, learned to look upon the opposite island as upon a haven of repose. They launched their barks upon its gloomy waters; they touched its shore, and they were at rest.'[80]

No one, however, can confidently say whether an early death is a misfortune, for no one can really know what calamities would have befallen the dead man if his life had been prolonged. How often does it happen that the children of a dead parent do things or suffer things that would have broken his heart if he had lived to see them! How often do painful diseases lurk in germ in the body which would have produced unspeakable misery if an early and perhaps a painless death had not anticipated their development! How often do mistakes and misfortunes cloud the evening and mar the beauty of a noble life, or moral infirmities, unperceived in youth or early manhood, break out before the day is over! Who is there who has not often said to himself as he looked back on a completed life, how much happier it would have been had it ended sooner? 'Give us timely death' is in truth one of the best prayers that man can pray. Pain, not Death, is the real enemy to be combated, and in this combat, at least, man can do much. Few men can have lived long without realising how many things are worse than death, and how many knots there are in life that Death alone can untie.

Remember, above all, that whatever may lie beyond the tomb, the tomb itself is nothing to you. The narrow prison-house, the gloomy pomp, the hideousness of decay, are known to the living and the living alone. By a too common illusion of the imagination, men picture themselves as consciously dead,—going through the process of corruption, and aware of it; imprisoned with the knowledge of the fact in the most hideous of dungeons. Endeavour earnestly to erase this illusion from your mind, for it lies at the root of the fear of death, and it is one of the worst sides of mediÆval and of much modern teaching and art that it tends to strengthen it. Nothing, if we truly realise it, is less real than the grave. We should be no more concerned with the after fate of our discarded bodies than with that of the hair which the hair-cutter has cut off. The sooner they are resolved into their primitive elements the better. The imagination should never be suffered to dwell upon their decay.

Bacon has justly noticed that while death is often regarded as the supreme evil, there is no human passion that does not become so powerful as to lead men to despise it. It is not in the waning days of life, but in the full strength of youth, that men, through ambition or the mere love of excitement, fearlessly and joyously encounter its risk. Encountered in hot blood it is seldom feared, and innumerable accounts of shipwrecks and other accidents, and many episodes in every war, show conclusively how calmly honour, duty, and discipline can enable men of no extraordinary characters, virtues, or attainments, to meet it even when it comes before them suddenly, as an inevitable fact, and without any of that excitement which might blind their eyes. If we analyse our own feelings on the death of those we love, we shall probably find that, except in cases where life is prematurely shortened and much promise cut off, pity for the dead person is rarely a marked element. The feelings which had long been exclusively concentrated on the sufferings of the dying man take a new course when the moment of death arrives. It is the sudden blank; the separation from him who is dear to us; the cessation of the long reciprocity of love and pleasure,—in a word our own loss,—that affects us then. 'A happy release' is perhaps the phrase most frequently heard around a death-bed. And as we look back through the vista of a few years, and have learned to separate death more clearly from the illness that preceded it, the sense of its essential peacefulness and naturalness grows upon us. A vanished life comes to be looked upon as a day that has past, but leaving many memories behind it.

It is, I think, a healthy tendency that is leading men in our own generation to turn away as much as possible from the signs and the contemplation of death. The pomp and elaboration of funerals; protracted mournings surrounding us with the gloom of an ostentatious and artificial sorrow; above all, the long suspension of those active habits which nature intended to be the chief medicine of grief, are things which at least in the English-speaking world are manifestly declining. We should try to think of those who have passed away as they were at their best, and not in sickness or in decay. True sorrow needs no ostentation, and the gloom of death no artificial enhancement. Every good man, knowing the certainty of death and the uncertainty of its hour, will make it one of his first duties to provide for those he loves when he has himself passed away, and to do all in his power to make the period of bereavement as easy as possible. This is the last service he can render before the ranks are closed, and his place is taken, and the days of forgetfulness set in. In careers of riot and of vice the thought of death may have a salutary restraining influence; but in a useful, busy, well-ordered life it should have little place. It was not the Stoics alone who 'bestowed too much cost on death, and by their preparations made it more fearful.'[81] As Spinoza has taught, 'the proper study of a wise man is not how to die but how to live,' and as long as he is discharging this task aright he may leave the end to take care of itself. The great guiding landmarks of a wise life are indeed few and simple; to do our duty—to avoid useless sorrow—to acquiesce patiently in the inevitable.