ed to believe that the fewer
our words the better. At the approach of death there is not much said;
good men are too honest to go out of the world professing more than they
know. There is perhaps no important subject about which, at any time,
even religious people speak so little to one another. In the fulness
of life the thought of death is mostly awakened by the sight or
recollection of the death of others rather than by the prospect of our
own. We must also acknowledge that there are degrees of the belief in
immortality, and many forms in which it presents itself to the mind.
Some persons will say no more than that they trust in God, and that they
leave all to Him. It is a great part of true religion not to pretend
to know more than we do. Others when they quit this world are comforted
with the hope 'That they will see and know their friends in heaven.' But
it is better to leave them in the hands of God and to be assured that
'no evil shall touch them.' There are others again to whom the belief in
a divine personality has ceased to have any longer a meaning; yet they
are satisfied that the end of all is not here, but that something still
remains to us, 'and some better thing for the good than for the evil.'
They are persuaded, in spite of their theological nihilism, that the
ideas of justice and truth and holiness and love are realities. They
cherish an enthusiastic devotion to the first principles of morality.
Through these they see, or seem to see, darkly, and in a figure, that
the soul is immortal.

But besides differences of theological opinion which must ever prevail
about things unseen, the hope of immortality is weaker or stronger in
men at one time of life than at another; it even varies from day to day.
It comes and goes; the mind, like the sky, is apt to be overclouded.
Other generations of men may have sometimes lived under an 'eclipse of
faith,' to us the total disappearance of it might be compared to the
'sun falling from heaven.' And we may sometimes have to begin again and
acquire the belief for ourselves; or to win it back again when it is
lost. It is really weakest in the hour of death. For Nature, like a kind
mother or nurse, lays us to sleep without frightening us; physicians,
who are the witnesses of such scenes, say that under ordinary
circumstances there is no fear of the future. Often, as Plato tells
us, death is accompanied 'with pleasure.' (Tim.) When the end is still
uncertain, the cry of ma