ny a one has been, 'Pray, that I may be taken.'
The last thoughts even of the best men depend chiefly on the accidents
of their bodily state. Pain soon overpowers the desire of life; old age,
like the child, is laid to sleep almost in a moment. The long experience
of life will often destroy the interest which mankind have in it. So
various are the feelings with which different persons draw near to
death; and still more various the forms in which imagination clothes it.
For this alternation of feeling compare the Old Testament,--Psalm vi.;
Isaiah; Eccles.

12. When we think of God and of man in his relation to God; of the
imperfection of our present state and yet of the progress which is
observable in the history of the world and of the human mind; of the
depth and power of our moral ideas which seem to partake of the very
nature of God Himself; when we consider the contrast between the
physical laws to which we are subject and the higher law which raises us
above them and is yet a part of them; when we reflect on our capacity of
becoming the 'spectators of all time and all existence,' and of framing
in our own minds the ideal of a perfect Being; when we see how the
human mind in all the higher religions of the world, including Buddhism,
notwithstanding some aberrations, has tended towards such a belief--we
have reason to think that our destiny is different from that of animals;
and though we cannot altogether shut out the childish fear that the soul
upon leaving the body may 'vanish into thin air,' we have still, so far
as the nature of the subject admits, a hope of immortality with which we
comfort ourselves on sufficient grounds. The denial of the belief takes
the heart out of human life; it lowers men to the level of the material.
As Goethe also says, 'He is dead even in this world who has no belief in
another.'

13. It is well also that we should sometimes think of the forms of
thought under which the idea of immortality is most naturally presented
to us. It is clear that to our minds the risen soul can no longer be
described, as in a picture, by the symbol of a creature half-bird,
half-human, nor in any other form of sense. The multitude of angels, as
in Milton, singing the Almighty's praises, are a noble image, and may
furnish a theme for the poet or the painter, but they are no longer an
adequate expression of the kingdom of God which is within us. Neither is
there any mansion, in this world or another, in which