the Christian missionary in
Britain, sitting one evening in the vast hall of a Saxon king,
surrounded by his thanes, having come thither to preach the gospel of
his Master; and as he spoke of life and death and immortality, a bird
flew in through an unglazed window, circled the hall in its flight,
and flew out once more into the darkness of the night. The Christian
priest bade the king see in the flight of the bird within the hall the
transitory life of man, and claimed for his faith that it showed the
soul, in passing from the hall of life, winging its way not into the
darkness of night, but into the sunlit radiance of a more glorious
world. Out of the darkness, through the open window of Birth, the life
of a man comes to the earth; it dwells for a while before our eyes;
into the darkness, through the open window of Death, it vanishes out
of our sight. And man has questioned ever of Religion, Whence comes
it? Whither goes it? and the answers have varied with the faiths.
To-day, many a hundred year since Paulinus talked with Edwin, there
are more people in Christendom who question whether man has a spirit
to come anywhence or to go anywhither than, perhaps, in the world's
history could ever before have been found at one time. And the very
Christians who claim that Death's terrors have been abolished, have
surrounded the bier and the tomb with more gloom and more dismal
funeral pomp than have the votaries of any other creed. What can be
more depressing than the darkness in which a house is kept shrouded,
while the dead body is awaiting sepulture? What more repellent than
the sweeping robes of lustreless crape, and the purposed hideousness
of the heavy cap in which the widow laments the "deliverance" of her
husband "from the burden of the flesh"? What more revolting than the
artificially long faces of the undertaker's men, the drooping
"weepers", the carefully-arranged white handkerchiefs, and, until
lately, the pall-like funeral cloaks? During the last few years, a
great and marked improvement has been made. The plumes, cloaks, and
weepers have well-nigh disappeared. The grotesquely ghastly hearse is
almost a thing of the past, and the coffin goes forth heaped over with
flowers instead of shrouded in the heavy black velvet pall. Men and
women, though still wearing black, do not roll themselves up in
shapeless garments like sable winding-sheets, as if trying to see how
miserable they could make themselves by the imposition