ie

|
the lesson of our own mortality, taught to us by every
death we see, will perhaps not even be learned.
| How singular we should think it, if we did not
know it to be almost universal, that the sight
of death in others should not teach us, more
practically than it does, the certain truth of the
unavoidable approach of our own.
| Young and old, strong and feeble, rich and poor,
gentle and simple, drop by our side, and the only
application which most of us make of these ex-
periences, seems to be that, since we have escaped
all these many times, therefore we may expect to
escape for ever.
In fact, the frequent sight of decay and death
| seems, instead of teaching us, to make us more
‘ignorant; instead of rendering us wiser, to turn
| us more stupid than before ; for, as usual, a lesson
| neglected, or a warning despised, only hardens the
heart, and dulls the understanding : and is it not
true that, with all our well-conned common-places
about death, we almost always recite them (if
with any thought and reference at all), with
thought and reference to other people only ?
We see the feeble, aged man of our engraving,
with failing eyesight, and bowed back, tottering
feebly about on his staff, wearily climbing his
turret staircase, and we think, “Poor old man,
his years are many now, there can be but few
more for him to add to them.”
We pay a visit to a sick friend ; we see a great
change in him; “Ah,” we say, as we leave the
house, “it is all up with him; he hardly looks as
if he would last through the night.”
We hear a passing-bell toll its solemn warning ;
and we say, “There is another gone to his last
account—I suppose it must be so and so,” or, “I
wonder who it is.”
We attend a funeral ; with its sombre accom-
paniments, its impressive words, its significant acts,
the earth rattling upon the coffin lid as an echo to the
sentence “ Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
All these things do, perhaps, strike us at the
time, do, perhaps, make us think that there is
something in death, but the impression soon passes
off, and we are most of us as careless and in-
different as ever, possibly, probably, more so, for
the very fact that the arrow of death has whirred
close past our ears without striking us, seems as
if it tended to make us think that the life which
we ourselves bear about is a charmed one.
We are like the starlings in the church steeple
—so used are we to the news and noise of death.
If a great bell were suddenly rung in the roof of
some barn where the starlings are wont to breed,
or in some dovecot in which they have effected a

lodgment, what a hurry, and flutter, and sereaming
| there would be among the birds ; but in the steeple
| the bells may toll for a funeral, or chime for

180 DEATH COMING AS A FRIEND.
church, or ring for a wedding, and the feathered

inhabitants will not care. The bells may fling
themselves wildly about with a clang and a roar, the
ropes rush madly up and down, fiercely wrapping
themselves and unwrapping themselves around and
off the wheels, but the birds are used to it, they
fly to and from their nests, they twitter to their |
young ones, they chatter among themselves, amidst |
all this clangour and turmoil, as freely as if there
were a dead silence and an undisturbed calm.

So are we with regard to the thoughts of death,
Death is ever making a great noise and demonstra-
tion around us, but, as it has not touched ws’ yet,
we seem as if we thought that it would never do so,

Yet we know that this is wrong ; we know that,
whatever else may be uncertain, death is sure ; we
know, too, that it is mysterious, that it is formid-
able ; and yet we are content to give less thought
to it than we are to such things as the choice of a
trade, the selection of a house. —

Nay, though every one of us must, as has been
said, bea Columbus for once in his life, and depart, by
himself too, for an untried, unknown shore, yet we, |
for the most part, make fewer and feebler prepara- |
tions for this voyage, think less about it beforehand,
than we do if we are going out for a summer holiday.

The means and manner of that are planned before
we start ; we finish up business that we may have
upon our minds, we provide ourselves with what
will be useful to take with us.

But as for death, what is it that frequently
passes as preparation for it ?

“The patient is so ill,” says the doctor, “ that
you must not tell him he is in danger. ‘There is
great risk now, and if you agitate him, you will
turn the risk into a certainty.”

The doctor is right, you may be committing
murder if you agitate the patient. After a while
he gets much worse, and no news, however unex-
pected, however alarming, can increase the danger.
A clergyman is sent for. Perhaps one who knows
very little of the sick man, perhaps an utter stranger.

What is he todo? The sick man is failing in
mind and body, it may be that he is under the in-
fluence of narcotics. How is the clergyman really
to prepare for their departure persons in sucha
condition as this, who have not made some prepa-
ration already.

A conventional mode of treatment is easy ; to
employ a formal confession, a formal viaticum, or
a formal adoption of the passwords and accepted
phraseology of some particular school ; but what
is to be done by a conscientious man, who cannot
bring himself to dally conventionally with such a
momentous question as that of death ?

Little, very little, it must be owned, though
perhaps more than appears on the surface. Of
exhortation and instruction, there can be little or