owed his friends, his worshipers, to be imprisoned, tortured and
murdered by His enemies. Such is the protection of God. Billions of
prayers have been uttered; has one been answered? Who sends plague,
pestilence and famine? Who bids the earthquake devour and the volcano
to overwhelm?

Tenth, again I say that it is wonderful to me that so many men, so many
women endure and carry their burdens to the natural end; that so many,
in spite of "age, ache and penury," guard with trembling hands the
spark of life; that prisoners for life toil and suffer to the last;
that the helpless wretches in poor-houses and asylums cling to life;
that the exiles in Siberia, loaded with chains, scarred with the knout,
live on; that the incurables, whose every breath is a pang, and for
whom the future has only pain, should fear the merciful touch and clasp
of death.

It is but a few steps at most from the cradle to the grave; a short
journey. The suicide hastens, shortens the path, loses the afternoon,
the twilight, the dusk of life's day; loses what he does not want, what
he cannot bear. In the tempest of despair, in the blind fury of
madness or in the calm of thought and choice the beleaguered soul finds
the serenity of death.

Let us leave the dead where nature leaves them. We know nothing of any
realm that lies beyond the horizon of the known, beyond the end of
life. Let us be honest with ourselves and others. Let us pity the
suffering, the despairing, the men and women hunted and pursued by
grief and shame, by misery and want, by chance and fate until their
only friend is death.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll -
Latest, by Robert Green Ingersoll

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