The Universalist. [volume] (Chicago [Ill.]) 1884-1897, 1888-03-31


and yet we know that it is so. Those
who were with us yesterday are gone
to-day. And, naturally enough, are
the closing scenes of life impressive
impressive to those who go and to
those who stay. No longer able to walk
or stand, the sick one lies upon his bed.
Once he had years before him; now
only days or hours. He can work no
more, and with failing strength his
words ale few and slow. We watch
the pallid face, we count the failing
pulse, we note the last breath, and in
low whispers say, he is dead. And then,
over the grave we say, earth to earth,
dust to dust"
Medical men have given much
thought to the phenomena of death
and the general conclusion is that in
the act of dying there is little suffer
ing. Nature provides her own an@s-
thetic the life forces retreat from the
extremities, and the nerves of sense are
numbed and lose their susceptibility to
pain. Much has been written, also,
upon the state of the mind in death.
In many instances the brain is not af-
fected, and every faculty is clear to the
last moment. Retreating upon itself
the mind is often intensely active.
Those who have been rescued from
drowning tell us that their whole lives
were present to consciousness in mo-
ment; and we have all observed, per-
haps, the transcendent and ilieffable
tenderness and depth Of love in the dy-
ing hour; the love Of fathers and moth
ers for their children, and their parting
words and blessings. And we have OBJ
served, too, the changed features of the
dead; how the traces of the last suffer
ings disappear, and the lifeless features
are wreathed in peaceful smile. 1t is
the impress, the kiss of the departing
spirit upon the dust through which it
has thought and spoken, laughed and
wept, and loved.
"And the spirit shall return unto
God who gave it," All along the lines
of science we hear it said, now, that all
life is from life, and we are coming to
realize that life is the one great essen
tial and permanent fact of the universe,
and that all life is from God or from
the infinite life. And all through the
Bible there runs this same thought that
God is the God of life, and in its higher
revelations, the duality of mans ma
ture as having body and soul is
often plainly stated. At center, man is
a spirit. We say he has a soul, but the
deeper truth is, that he is a soul, and
that he has body.
What is left when the body dies ? ALI
that there was in the real being before
death. The spirit itself has form and
feeling; it is this that gives form and
feeling to the body in life, and it is the
going away of this that leaves the body
but dust. The spirit lives in God now
as really as it does after death, but
the presence of body that is related
to the earth makes man appear to live
in the material, and he does thus live;
but God is in the essence of the mater
ial, and in every vital law of nature.
And hence to return to God'' is not
to be withdrawn from or taken out of
relation to nature, but to be more Deep
ly conditioned in the finer or higher
laws of the natural. 1t is not to have
the old flesh body that dies made over,
as was once thought, but to have an
ethereal Oh celestial body. One great
mistake and the difficulty of thought
upon this subject are in thinking that
this surface appearance of things is all
there is of nature, when, in fact, it is
but the smallest part. We begin our
conscious life out here in the senses
and upon the surface of things but
we come from the inner, the higher,
and to this the soul returns.
The return of the spirit to God at
death does not, we may suppose, mean
any violent change in the mode of its
being, nor necessarily, the going away
in space to some distant world, but
rather, the letting go of the present
sense-relations to the lower material,
or natural, and coming into more con-
scious relationship or correspondence
with the finer life forces of the higher
natural on the spirit side of being.
And it means also clearer realization
of the moral, or Of the world of moral
principles, and hence of God, in whom
all moral principles exist in perfection
And thus it is that the approach Of the
death of the body turns the soul in
wardly upon itself. And this is some
thing common in the experience of al
most every life when even thinking of
death, for death means the end of the
earthly, and the soul naturally asks
what it has aside from this; what of
moral principle and worth, and what
of good done in the world. And this
involves all its relations to man and to
God
Man somehow intuitively realizes
that only the good is of value in the