The daily Green Mountain freeman. [volume] (Montpelier, Vt.) 1861-1865, 1863-07-20
The Dying.


a good man once, as he was just entering on
the endless journey. Ye shall see heaven
open, and the angels Of God ascending and
descending, was the promise to the disciples
of our Lord, and through them, to Christians
Of all time. Literally, as well as metaphor
cally, in life as we'll as In dying hour, has
the declaration been verified verified every
day in the life, as we'll as in the death of the
righteous and will be, till death shall be no
more. Sights have been seen, and sounds
heard-sights and sounds, freghted with raw
lshing sweetness to Christian people, in the
broad daylight of life and health, and in the
gloom of the grave sights and sounds vouch-
sated to cheer, when cheer is the most need
ed, when none can come from any mortal
source, as if the very last, last moment of
Christian life should be tuifllment of a
promise given by the Master, to be with them
when they were walking il" through the val.
ley and shadow of death"
The utterances of dying Christians indicate
that they see, or think they see, angelic
forms, and the familiar faces of the departed
dead, lowering about them, and, with smiles
of inefable sweetness, beokoning them away
to the elysium Of the blessed. If these be
mere fancies, they are delicious fancies if
facts, they are glorious beyond expression.
Whether it were but dreaming or seem >
ing, the angels Cd the ladder from earth to
heaven, and the promise of the Lord, who
stood at It's top, the precousness of it was to
Jacob all the same as if it had been an EN-.
bodied fact especially as the promise which
he heard in his dream was literally complied
with.
The film which covers the mortal eye, and
hides from physical sense the beings and the
things at hand, has been brushed away in the
case Of patriarchs and prophets of olden time :;
and later, on the Mount of TRANSPORTATION :;
and various martys Of after ages have had
their faces so lighted up with heaveniaess
that it is difficult to be accounted for, except
by the fact Of an actual sight of heavenly
things.
But, further on in the act and article of dis
solution, the sight that pierces ether, faints,
and fails, and fades, and taste is dead, and
touch is dead and tongue, aud feeling, and
smell, all, all are dead Not SO the ear it
survives them all, for it is the last sense that
dies and it is the repeated testimony of those
who have returned to life from the turthest
limits beyond, that the whole atmosphere
seemed to be filed with sounds so ravishing
as to be indcscribable by mortal words. 1t
has been testified to by persons who have been
drowned, apparently, and then brought to,
that the very last perception was that of de-
lightful music
A dying man sheds no tears. He calls his
wife and children, his parents, his best friends
to his bedside, and though tear drops rain
from every eye, the contamination of tears
never comes to him, never the one falls down
his cheek This is because the manufactures
of life have stopped forever the human ma
chine has run down at last; every gland Of
the system has Its functions, and that is why
death steps in, and, like a remorseless sheriff,
takes possession and stops everything. In al
most all diseases the liver is the first manufac-
tory that stops work-one by one the others
follow, and all the fountains of life are at
length dried up there is no secretion any,
where the lips and tongue, how dry as we
have all seen the skin how dry or, il moist
ened by the damp Of death, it is from mechan-
ical causes. So the eye in death weeps not
not that all affection is dead in the heart but
because there is not tear drop in it, any
more than their is moisture on the lip, which
undying affection, when it can do nothing else,
'aVes necessarily with the little mop or feath
er.
There is one sign of approaching dissou-
ton. We have never 0een it alluded to- and
yet we have never seen it fail When the ex-