Wide-eyed philanthropy is not merely money-giving goodness, but the wider kindness which aids the ascendancy of the right and minimises misery everywhere.
Death teaches, as nothing else does, one useful lesson. Whatever affection or friendship we may have shown to one we have lost, Death brings to our memory countless acts of tenderness which we had neglected. Conscience makes us sensible of these omissions now it is too late to repair them. But we can pay to the living what we think we owe to the dead; whereby we transmute the dead we honor into benefactors of those they leave behind. This is a useful form of consolation, of which all survivors may avail themselves.
Mrs. Ernestine Rose—a brave advocate of unfriended right—when age and infirmity brought her near to death, recalled the perils and triumphs in which she had shared, the slave she had helped to set free from the bondage of ownership, and the slave minds she had set free from the bondage of authority; she was cheered, and exclaimed: "But I have lived."
The day will come when all around this grave shall meet death; but it will be a proud hour if, looking back upon a useful and generous past, we each can say: "I have lived."
IV.——ON A CAREER OF PUBLIC USEFULNESS.
In reasoning upon death no one has surpassed the argument of Socrates, who said: "Death is one of two things: either the dead may be nothing and have no feeling—well, then, if there be no feeling, but it be like sleep, when the sleeper has no dream, surely death would be a marvellous gain, for thus all futurity appears to be nothing more than one night. If, on the other hand, death be a removal hence to another place, and what is said be true, that all the dead are there, what greater blessing can there be than this?"
Sir Edwin Arnold, in his Secret of Death, writes:
"Nay, but as when one layeth
His worn-out robes away,
And, taking new ones, sayeth,
'These will I wear to-day!'
So putteth by the spirit
Lightly its garb of flesh,
And passeth to inherit
A residence afresh."
This may be true, and there is no objection to it if it is. But the pity is, nobody seems to be sure about it. At death we may mourn, but duty ceaseth not. If we desist in endeavors for the right because a combatant falls at our side, no battle will ever be won. "Life," Mazzini used to say, "is a battle and a march." Those who serve others at their own peril are always in
"battle." Let us honor them as they pass. Some of them have believed: