V
I talked some time ago to an orthodox Christian lady whose brother had recently died, and who was speaking of death.
"The one mystery," she called it, "on which no single ray of light has been vouchsafed in all the ages man has been on earth."
I did not agree with her, but knowing her to be an orthodox Christian lady I did not venture to express my opinion.
But hers is the position which many, perhaps most, of us take. "No one has ever come back," we say, "to tell us what his experience has been," and we drop the subject there. Not only do we drop the subject there, but we resent it if everyone else does not drop the subject there. "God has hidden it from us," we declare, "and what He has hidden from us it is presumption for us to pry into." It is useless to urge the fact that this way of reasoning would have kept us still in the Stone Age; we are not to be reached by argument.
Let me say at once that I am not taking up the question of the psychic, or entering into it at all. I shall keep myself to the two points of view which have helped me, as an individual, to overcome, to some degree, the fear of death, considering them in reverse order from that in which I have mentioned them. Those two points of view are:
A. That, according to God's Will, we come into this phase of being for an "appointed time" which we do not always reach;
B. That we pass out of this phase of being as we came into it, for Growth.