Browning, the most virile of our poets, cries:
“I was ever a fighter, so—one fight more,
The best and the last!
I would hate that death bandaged my eyes and forebore,
And bade me creep past.
No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers,
The heroes of old.”
Yet this curious evasion of the inevitable is only the natural outcome of a looseness of theology which, while it admits the dogma of right and wrong, of free will and human responsibility, hurls the perfect and the imperfect, the saint and the sinner alike, into the same heaven without an instant’s transition. As very few now believe in hell, it is no unfair conclusion to draw that the mere fact of death seems, in the eyes of most people, to qualify the soul for eternal bliss. It is idle to ask what becomes of the generally accepted doctrine of moral responsibility, why, if all are alike and certain to be saved, anyone should put himself to the disagreeable task of resisting temptation, much less strive after perfection here below; but failure to provide help for the dying is the direct consequence of the denial of future expiation.
“What man is there among you who, if his son shall ask bread, will he reach him a stone?”