The weekly register. [volume] (Point Pleasant, Va. [W. Va.]) 1862-1909, 1890-09-17
senator Ingalls, ON Life and
Denfh.

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Death.
From the Eulogy ON senator Beck
The right to live is, in human
estimation, the most sacred, the
most inviolable, the most inalienable.
The joy of living in such splendid
and luminous day as this is incon-
J ceivable. To exist is exuItation.
Annihilation, extinction, and eternal
death are the forebodings of despair.
To know, to love, to achieve, TO tri-
umph, to confer happiness, to allevi-
ate misery, is rapture. The greatest
crime and the severst penalty
known to human law is the sacrifice
and forfeiture of life.
And yet we are all under sentence
of death. Other events may or may
not occure. Other conditions may
or may not exist. We may be rich
or poor; we may be learned or gno-
rant; we may be happy or wrctched;
but we all must die. The verdict
has been pronounced by the inexor-
able decree of an omnipotent tribu-
nal. Without trial or opportunity
for defence; with no knowledge of
the accuser, or the nature and cause
of the accusation; without being
confronted with the witnesses
against us, we have been summoned
to the bar of life and condemned to
death. There is no writ of error.
nor review. There Is neither ex-
culpation nor appeal. All must be
relinquished. Beauty. and deformi
ty, good and evil, virture and vice,
share the same relentless fate. The
tender mother cries passionately for
mercy for her first born, but there
is no clemency. The craven feIon
sullenly prays for a moment in
which to be aneled, but there is no
reprieve. The soul helplessIy beats
its wings against the bars, shudders
and disappears.
The prescription extends alike 10
the individual and the type. Ma
tions die and races expire. Human
ity itself is destined to extinction.
Sooner or later it is the instruction
of science that the energy of the
earth will be expended, and it will
become incapable of supporting life.
A groupe of feeble and pallid surviv-
ors in some sheltered valley in the
tropics will behold the sun sink
below the horizon and the pitiless
stars glitter in the midnight sky.
The last man will perish, and the
sun will rise upon an earth without
an inhabitant. Its atmosphere, it's
seas, its life and heat, will vanish,
and the planet will be an idle cinder
uselessly spinning in its orbit.
Every hour some world dies un-
noticed in the armament; some sun
smolders to embers and ashes on the
hearthstone of infinite space, and
-ruv rrtgnry rrrsrsse OF ny vevr,rs swvvpv
ceaselessly onward in its voyage of
doom to remorseless and unsparing
destruction.
With the disappearance of man
from the earth, all traces of his exis-
tence will be lost. The palaces,
towers, and temples he has reared,
the institutions he has established.
the cities he has builded, the books
he has written, the creeds he has con-
structed, the PHILOSOPHERS he has
formulated-all science, art, litera-
ture, and knowledge will be obliter-
ated and engulfed in empty and
vacant oblivion.
The great globe itself,
Yea, all Nhich it inherit, shall dissolve.
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded
Leave not a rack behind.
There is an Intelligence so vast
and enduring that the flaming inter
walls between the birth and death OF
universes is no more than the flash
of fire flies above the meadows of
summer; colossal power by which
these stupendous orbs are launched
in the abyss, like bubbles blown by
a child in the morning sun, and
whose sense of justice and
reason cannot be potential than
A II
the law of being to the creatures He
has made, and which compel them
to declare that if the only object of
creation is destruction, if infinitly
is the theatre of an uninterrupted
series of irreparable calamities, i'll
the final cause of life is death, then
time is inexplicable tragedy, and
eternity an illogical and indefensible