set when you
were crossing here; how it seemed as if no man could live alone in such
waves, and yet how you clung to and saved the boy who was with you,
swimming through the water that splashed over your head and very nearly
drowned you. The boy's father and mother have never forgotten that, and
they are even now mourning without in the veranda. It is all due to you
that their lives have not been full of misery and despair. Remember
their faces when you brought their little son to them saved from death
in the great river. Surely that is a pleasant thing. Remember your wife
who is now with you; how you have loved her and cherished her, and kept
faithful to her before all the world. You have been a good husband to
her, and you have honoured her. She loves you, and you have loved her
all your long life together. Surely that is a pleasant thing.'

Yes, surely these are pleasant things to have with one at the last.
Surely a man will die easier with such memories as these before his
eyes, with love in those about him, and the calm of good deeds in his
dying heart. If it be a different way of soothing a man's end from those
which other nations use, is it the worse for that?

Think of your good deeds. It seems a new idea to me that in doing well
in our life we are making for ourselves a pleasant death, because of the
memory of those things. And if we have none? or if evil so outnumbered
the good deeds as to hide and overwhelm them, what then? A man's death
will be terrible indeed if he cannot in all his days remember one good
deed that he has done.

'All a man's life comes before him at the hour of death,' said my
informant; 'all, from the earliest memory to the latest breath. Like a
whole landscape called by a flash of lightning out of the dark night. It
is all there, every bit of it, good and evil, pleasure and pain, sin and
righteousness.'

A man cannot escape from his life even in death. In our acts of to-day
we are determining what our death will be; if we have lived well, we
shall die well; and if not, then not. As a man lives so shall he die, is
the teaching of Buddhism as of other creeds.

So what Buddhism has to offer to the dying believer is this, that if he
live according to its tenets he will die happily, and that in the life
that he will next enter upon he will be less and less troubled by sin,
less and less wedded to the lust of life, until sometime, far away, he
shall gain the great Deliverance. He shall hav