nty whether you can safely
count on the passing day. It is not the death you die, but these many
deaths you do not die, which shadow your existence. Poor blindfolded
creatures that you are, cringing at every step in apprehension of the
stroke that perhaps is not to fall till old age, never raising a cup to
your lips with the knowledge that you will live to quaff it, never sure
that you will meet again the friend you part with for an hour,
from whose hearts no happiness suffices to banish the chill of an
ever-present dread, what idea can you form of the Godlike security with
which we enjoy our lives and the lives of those we love! You have
a saying on earth, 'To-morrow belongs to God;' but here to-morrow
belongs to us, even as to-day. To you, for some inscrutable purpose, He
sees fit to dole out life moment by moment, with no assurance that each
is not to be the last. To us He gives a lifetime at once, fifty, sixty,
seventy years,--a divine gift indeed. A life such as yours would, I
fear, seem of little value to us; for such a life, however long, is but
a moment long, since that is all you can count on."

"And yet," I answered, "though knowledge of the duration of your lives
may give you an enviable feeling of confidence while the end is far off,
is that not more than offset by the daily growing weight with which the
expectation of the end, as it draws near, must press upon your minds?"

"On the contrary," was the response, "death, never an object of fear,
as it draws nearer becomes more and more a matter of indifference to the
moribund. It is because you live in the past that death is grievous to
you. All your knowledge, all your affections, all your interests,
are rooted in the past, and on that account, as life lengthens,
it strengthens its hold on you, and memory becomes a more precious
possession. We, on the contrary, despise the past, and never dwell upon
it. Memory with us, far from being the morbid and monstrous growth it is
with you, is scarcely more than a rudimentary faculty. We live wholly
in the future and the present. What with foretaste and actual taste, our
experiences, whether pleasant or painful, are exhausted of interest by
the time they are past. The accumulated treasures of memory, which you
relinquish so painfully in death, we count no loss at all. Our minds
being fed wholly from the future, we think and feel only as we
anticipate; and so, as the dying man's future contracts, there is less
and less