would not get in--he has been drowned, and the waves of God's wrath
will sweep over him forever." This is the consolation of Christianity
and the only honest consolation that Christianity can have for the
widow and orphans of an unbeliever. Suppose, however, that the
Christian minister has too tender a heart to tell what he believes
to be the truth--then he can say to the sorrowing friends: "Perhaps
the man repented before he died; perhaps he is not in hell, perhaps
you may meet him in heaven;" and this "perhaps" is a consolation
not growing out of Christianity, but out of the politeness of the
preacher--out of paganism.

_Question_. Do you not think that the Bible has consolation for
those who have lost their friends?

_Answer_. There is about the Old Testament this strange fact--I
find in it no burial service. There is in it, I believe, from the
first mistake in Genesis to the last curse in Malachi, not one word
said over the dead as to their place and state. When Abraham died,
nobody said: "He is still alive--he is in another world." When
the prophets passed away, not one word was said as to the heaven
to which they had gone. In the Old Testament, Saul inquired of
the witch, and Samuel rose. Samuel did not pretend that he had
been living, or that he was alive, but asked: "Why hast thou
disquieted me?" He did not pretend to have come from another world.
And when David speaks of his son, saying that he could not come
back to him, but that he, David, could go to his son, that is but
saying that he, too, must die. There is not in the Old Testament
one hope of immortality. It is expressly asserted that there is
no difference between the man and beast--that as the one dieth so
dieth the other. There is one little passage in Job which commentators
have endeavored to twist into a hope of immortality. Here is a
book of hundreds and hundreds of pages, and hundreds and hundreds
of chapters--a revelation from God--and in it one little passage,
which, by a mistranslation, is tortured into saying something about
another life. And this is the Old Testament. I have sometimes
thought that the Jews, when slaves in Egypt, were mostly occupied
in building tombs for mummies, and that they became so utterly
disgusted with that kind of work, that the moment they founded a
nation for themselves they went out of the tomb business. The
Egyptians were believers in immortality, and spent almost their
entire substance upo