t but a resultant of
many forces? Experience of past failures and past resolves combine with
trivial and momentary motives to make us choose to resist. If we fail
and yield, the motive is not strong enough. Yet we have the sense that
we might have done differently: we blame ourselves, and not the past
which made us ourselves.

But with death it is different. Here, if ever, falls the fiat of the
Mind that bade us be. And thus the only way in which we can approach it
is to put ourselves in dependence upon that Spirit. And the only course
we can follow is this: not by endeavouring to anticipate in thought the
moment of our end--that, perhaps, only adds to its terrors when it
comes--but by resolutely and tenderly, day after day, learning to
commend ourselves to the hand of God; to make what efforts we can; to
do our best; to decide as simply and sincerely as possible what our
path should be, and then to leave the issue humbly and quietly with God.

I do this, a little; it brings with it a wonderful tranquillity and
peace. And the strange thing is that one does not do it oftener, when
one has so often experienced its healing and strengthening power.

To live then thus; not to cherish far-off designs, or to plan life too
eagerly; but to do what is given us to do as carefully as we can; to
follow intuitions; to take gratefully the joys of life; to take its
pains hopefully, always turning our hearts to the great and merciful
Heart above us, which a thousand times over turns out to be more tender
and pitiful than we had dared to hope. How far I am from this faith.
And yet I see clearly that it is the only power that can sustain. For
in such a moment of insight even the thought of the empty chair, the
closed books, the disused pen, the sorrowing hearts, and the
flower-strewn mound fail to blur the clear mirror of the mind.

For him there can be but two alternatives: either the spirit that we
knew has lost the individuality that we knew and is merged again in the
great vital force from which it was for a while separated; or else,
under some conditions that we cannot dream of, the identity remains,
free from the dreary material conditions, free to be what it desired to
be; knowing perhaps the central peace which we know only by subtle
emanations; seeing the region in which beauty, and truth, and purity,
and justice, and high hopes, and virtue are at one; no longer baffled
by delay, and drooping languor, and sad forebodings, but