"Though love repine and reason chafe,
There came a voice without reply—
'Tis man's perdition to be safe,
When for the truth he ought to die.'"
They are of those who, as another poet has said, "are not to be mourned, but to be imitated."* The mystery of death is no greater than the mystery of life. All that precedes our existence was unseen, unimaginable, and unknown to us. What may succeed in the future is unprovable by philosopher or priest:
"A flower above and the mould below:
And this is all that the mourners know."**
The ideal of life which gives calmness and confidence in death is the same in the mind of the wise Christian as in the mind of the philosopher. Sydney Smith says: "Add to the power of discovering truth the desire of using it for the promotion of human happiness, and you have the great end and object of our existence."*** Putting just intention into action, a man fulfils the supreme duty of life, which casts out all fear of the future.
* W. J. Linton.
** Barry Cornwall.
*** Moral Philosophy.
A poet who thought to reconcile to their loss those whose lines have not fallen to them in pleasant places wrote:
"A little rule, a little sway,
A sunbeam on a winter's day,
Is all the proud and mighty have
Between the cradle and the grave."
This is not true; the proud and mighty have rest at choice, and play at will. The "sunbeam" is on them all their days. Between the cradle and the grave is the whole existence of man. The splendid inheritance of the "proud and mighty" ought to be shared by all whose labor creates and makes possible the good fortune of those who "toil not, neither do they spin"*, and whoever has sought to endow the industrious with liberty and intelligence, with competence and leisure, we may commit to the earth in the sure and certain hope that they deserve well, and will fare well, in any "land of the leal" to which mankind may go.