Such familiarity may be, and often is, condemned as presumptuous. There may be cases in which it is so; but I think it would be hard to make the censure general. The confident reckoning on the joys of heaven for one’s self, on any grounds, while others are supposed to be condemned to a contrary lot, is a superstition more offensive to my feelings than that which renders a trembling soul, clinging to life, aghast at the idea of meeting its Maker and Father. But a soul without any self-complacency, or ignorant confidence, may yet be easy and eager in the prospect of entering upon that awful new scene. Setting aside all the inducements from the hope of relief and rest, the humblest spirit may be conceived of as tranquil and aspiring in full view of the transition; and this under a full sense of its sins and failures, and without reliance on any imaginary security,—without need of other reliance than its Father in Heaven. There may be—there is—in some, so continual a regard to God in life, that there cannot seem anything very new and strange in going anywhere where He is. There maybe—and there is—in some, so earnest a desire to be purified from sin, that they would undergo anything on earth to be freed from it, and therefore fear nothing, but rather welcome any discipline which may be reserved beyond. Knowing that the revelation of the evil of their sin must be most painful, but also most necessary to their progress, they are ready, even eager for it, pressing forward to the suffering through which they hope to be made perfect. If with such dispositions is joined that ardent, reverential filial love which generates perfect trust, and rejects any interposition between itself and the benign countenance in whose light it lives, there may be nothing blameable or dangerous in the readiness for death, or in the happy familiarity with which the event may be spoken of. It is a case in which every man should be slow to judge his neighbour, while the natural verdict of thoughtful observers would seem to be that a sufferer under irremediable illness, who preserves a general patience, cares for others’ happiness more than for his own, and has always lived in view of an eternal life, can hardly be wrong in anticipating that life with ease and cheerfulness, whatever analysis or judgment dogmatists may make of his state of mind.
Whether our imaginings of Death are more or less a true anticipation of it, can be proved only by experience. It may be found that they are no more just than my idea of the matter when I was a child, when my brother and I dug a grave, and then lay down in it, by turns, and shut our eyes, to try what dying was like. Practically, such failures of conception cannot matter much. A person who is setting out on foreign travel for the first time, takes no harm by expecting the voyage and the landing among foreigners to be something very unlike what they prove. His preconceptions answered their purpose, by rendering him ready and willing to go, and preventing his being taken by surprise by the summons. Still, those of us have greatly the advantage whose minds are enlarged by knowledge, and their imaginations animated and strengthened by exercise. Some of the most innocent and kind-hearted people I have known have been the most afraid of death,—not from consciousness of sin, but from dread of overpowering novelty—from a horror of feeling lost among scenes where there is nothing familiar; while, in opposite cases, a philosophic interest and wonder have been known to go far in reconciling a highly intellectual man to leaving the companions he loved best in life.
There can be no question as to the difference in the ease of departure (moral conditions being supposed the same) of the housewife, whose days and faculties have been occupied with the market, the shop, and the home where her whole life has been passed, and the philosopher, whose nerves thrill with delight, unmixed with terror, at the very first view of the new wonders revealed by Lord Rosse’s speculum. It is striking, that a man about to be thrust forth from life for a plot of murder on an enormous scale, should, while waiting for death the next moment, whisper to a fellow-sufferer, “Now we shall soon know the great secret;” while a pure and beneficent being, beloved by God and his neighbour, should pray to be loaded with any weight of years and sufferings rather than go from the familiar scene on which he has opened his eyes every day for sixty years. “Grand secrets” have no charms for him, but only horrors; and as for new scenes, even within our own corner of the earth, mountains and waterfalls overpower him, and he shuffles back to shops and streets.
Let persons so constitutionally different be shut into a sick-room, knowing that they will issue from it only by death, and what will they do? By the habit of looking forward to this exit for relief, the timid may come to speak and think of it as tranquilly as the speculative; but then, when the sensation overtakes him, the difference is again apparent. It does seem as if there were in the seizure of death a sensation wholly peculiar, and which cannot be mistaken. Cases of unconsciousness are no evidence to the contrary; and there are so many instances of decisive declaration by the dying, as to make the fact pretty certain. Then finally appears (supposing both conscious) the distinction in the act of dying, between the enlarged and speculative mind and the contracted one which clings to details. Then the harassed sufferer, who has a hundred times exclaimed, in the struggles of disease, “O! this is dying many times over!” shudders out at last, in quite another tone, “O God! this is death!” Then the exhausted debauchee, after every hollow show of preparation by decorous prayer, mutters, in the terror of the reality, “O God! this is death!” At such a time, the philosophic physician, seizing his sole opportunity of experience of the phenomena of death, keeps his finger on his pulse as his heart is coming to a stop, and notifies its last beat as a fact in useful science. At such a time, the diligent Christian—a judge, a rich man, without a crook in his lot—suddenly sentenced, struggles to breathe into his wife’s bending ear his last words: “This is death! Our children ... tell them—I have had everything man could enjoy ... and all is nothing in comparison with holiness. Pure and holy—make them. Care for nothing else! O! all is well!” When he could no longer speak or move, his countenance was full of soul; not a trace of fear upon it, but a whole heaven of joyful expectation. Here are differences!
Of course, there is no waiting till the last moment for these differences to show themselves. Outside enquirers may be satisfied that invalids’ anticipation of death varies with their habits of mind. Some merely anticipate; some contemplate. With some, the anticipation is merely of relief and rest; with others it is worthier of our human and Christian hope. In no case of permanent illness can I conceive the idea to be otherwise than familiar, under one aspect or another; so familiar, as that it is astonishing to us that we can obtain so little conversation upon it as a reality—a certainty in full view. To us this seems more extraordinary than it would be if the friends of Parry, and Franklin, or Back, were, as the season for a Polar expedition drew nigh, to talk to them about everything else, but be constrained and shy on that. I say “more extraordinary,” because it is not everybody that is bound, sooner or later, to the North Pole, but only a few crews; whereas, all have an interest in the passage of that other, that “narrow sea,” and in the “better country” which is its further shore.
Perhaps the familiarity of the idea of death is by nothing so much enhanced to us as by the departure before us of those who have sympathised in our prospect. The close domestic interest thus imparted to that other life is such as I certainly never conceived of when in health, and such as I observe people in health do not conceive of now. It seems but the other day that I was receiving letters of sympathy and solace, and also of religious and philosophical investigation as to how life here and hereafter appeared to me; letters which told of activity, of labours, and journeyings, which humbled me by a sense of idleness and uselessness, while they spoke of humbling feelings in regarding the privileges of my seclusion. All this is as if it were yesterday: and now, these correspondents have been gone for years. For years we have thought of them as knowing “the grand secret,” as familiarized with those scenes we are for ever prying into, while I lie no wiser (in such a comparison) than when they endeavoured to learn somewhat of these matters from me. And besides these close and dear companions, what departures are continually taking place! Every new year there are several—friends, acquaintance, or strangers—who shake their heads when I am mentioned, in friendly regret at another year opening before me without prospect of health—who send me comforts or luxuries, or words of sympathy, amidst the pauses of their busy lives; and before another year comes round, they have dropped out of our world—have learned quickly far more than I can acquire by my leisure—and from being merely outside my little spot of life, have passed to above and beyond it. Little ones who speculated on me with awe—youthful ones who ministered to me with pity—- busy and important persons, who gave a cordial but passing sigh to the lot of the idle and helpless; some of all these have outstripped me, and left me looking wistfully after them. Such incidents make the future at least as real and familiar to me as the outside world; and every permanent invalid will say the same: and we must not be wondered at if we speak of that great interest of ours oftener, and with more familiarity, than others use.
Neither should we be wondered at if we speak with a confidence which some cannot share, of meeting these our friends, and communing with them, when we ourselves depart. We have no power to doubt of this, if we believe at all that we shall live hereafter. I have said how intensely we feel that our spiritual part is indestructible. We feel no less vividly that of that spiritual part the affections are the true vitality; that they are the soul within the soul—our inmost life. The affections cannot exist without their objects; and our congenial friends—the brethren of our soul—therefore survive as surely as God survives. If God is recognisable by the worshipper, and Christ by the Christian, the beloved are recognisable by those who love. To demur to this to the sufferer who (all other life being weakened and embittered) lives by the affections, divine and human, is, to him, much like doubting whether the atmosphere bears any relation to music, or the human understanding to truth.
If there are hours when, through pain and weakness, we would fain decline existence altogether, as a sick and wearied child frets at sunshine and music, and would rather sleep in darkness and silence, there is no moment in which we do not believe, as if we saw, that the departed righteous are in communion, full and active, in exact proportion as the ardour and fidelity of their mutual love deserves and necessitates. We believe this as if we saw it, whatever be our own immediate mood, as, on every night of winter, however cloudy, we are well assured that the constellations are in the sky,—that Orion and the Wain have risen and are circling, steady, clear and serene, whatever be the state of the elements below them. As the life of the sick-room must necessarily be, whether its objects be high or low, one of faith and not of sight, those who visit it may easily perceive that it is not the appropriate field for demonstration. In its own province Demonstration is supreme. There let it dictate and pronounce. But we sufferers inhabit a separate region of human experience, where there is another and a prophetic oracle; where the voice of Demonstration itself must be dumb before that of the steadfast, incommunicable assurance of the soul.
Here are some of the aspects of Death to the long-suffering Invalid.