cked.

You may stand above the simple mound of the churchyard, in front of
some monumental shaft, or before the sculptured urn; it may be the
dust of a king, a scholar, or some nameless beggar which is heaped
within--the silence will be unbroken--except by the sound of your
own voice as you ask:

"Where are they? What are they? ARE they?"

Although the sun may be shining in full splendor over row after row
of graves, no light will be there in which to read the answer to
your questions.

Instead of light there will be thick darkness upon the graves, and
gross darkness within.

Men peer into this darkness. There is no vision--no speech--and they
ask: "Is it worth while to toil, to labor, to accumulate, to make
great advance in knowledge, to build higher every day the conning
towers of science, and then leaving these high points of
achievement, enter into that realm where no surveyor's chain has
ever measured the extent, where no geographer has ever named a
headland, and where the one supreme fact that meets us on the
threshold is ignorance--a black, blinding, all-pervading ignorance
as to the next moment after death; so that at the end of our
reasoning, deduction and amplification, the one thing remaining to
the scholar and the fool alike concerning death is a guess, a guess
in which the wish of existence is father to the thought, but where
the hope of to-morrow is, easily, the despair of to-day."

With life so brief, so uncertain, and ending in the starless night
of silence, men in one form of utterance or another are, in
substance, calling to each other and saying, "Let us eat and drink--
for to-morrow we die."

Thus the contemplation of death and its impartial and unprejudiced
analysis leads to a belief in materialism and a greater or less
surrender to mere sensualism; for, if men cannot go up they will go
down; if they cannot live in the spirit, they will grovel in the
flesh.

What then shall we say concerning this fact of death?

Shall we say it is a part of nature's economy--as legitimate as
birth? Because we know nothing of any pre-existent state and are
content to go forward in life, shall we now balk and hesitate to
discharge our functions or meet our opportunities, because we have
no evidence of an after existence?

Is death really natural?

Absolutely it is not!

The whole being of man revolts against it, morally, intellectually
and organically. Every law of nature in man is against it. Pain a