I do not know; my faith in immortality may be the child of my hopes and longings. If I am always to be I always was in existence somewhere. I am positively certain that I know of no evidence to prove a past existence, for hope does not lead backward. Hope points always ahead, from where the winds of the future are always blowing. I know that I desire to live always, to think always, to hope always, to love on and on forever and ever.
TEACH SENTIMENT
Sentiment is a creature of education. A child will naturally imitate its parents. If they are unfeeling and cruel, the child will be the same, at least until it falls under a different influence. Sentiment is not inherited. The average child is cruel and heartless until old enough to imitate the sentimental spirit of old people. Therefore, it should be the first lesson impressed upon the child mind that cruelty and wanton heartlessness is brutal, and does not belong to civilized man.
In my own case I have always been opposed to keeping pet animals or birds confined in a cage—no, not always: When a boy I was always catching birds and squirrels and rabbits to start a menagerie. I remember one time of keeping a red squirrel in a cage for two years. I hadn’t then learned that kindness to the weakest of God’s creatures shows a largeness of the human heart. I was then a lad of fifteen years.
But one day while watching the red squirrel leaping from one side of the cage to the bottom, then bounding to the other side and back again, and on to the opposite side and back again, over and over again, all through the day, and day after day, for the exercise it needed to keep its health—one day while watching the poor imprisoned animal at its daily exercise, the thought came to me that the little animal would be so much happier outside the cage. Then it dawned on me that I was simply keeping the poor thing imprisoned to gratify my own selfish pleasure. Simply to look at and enjoy its efforts to make life tolerable under such distressing conditions. I had actually been enjoying the restless efforts of the squirrel to make prison life healthful; for had the animal sat down to mourn and pout and sorrow for the freedom it once enjoyed, it would have died in a few weeks.
My heart smote me. I saw what a cruel jailor I had been. It’s bad enough to imprison bad men and shut them away from the sunlight and flowers and the smiles of good women and children, just as though darkness and heartaches and misery would make a human being better. But here I was imprisoning an innocent animal simply for the selfish pleasure that comes from the possession of things not justly my own. Like the millionaire who gets a monopoly on the necessaries of life, and forces the people to pay tribute into his coffers for the sole and only pleasure of possessing more dollars than his neighbors.
If he has sentiment enough to use those dollars for the benefit of civilization and to relieve the distress of the people, it is not so bad, but hoarding up for the pleasure that comes from sheer possession, is worse than brutal—it is maniacal.
Well, my conscience smote me on the educated end of my sentiment, and one day I opened the cage and let the squirrel go back to the woods. I had learned a lesson I never forgot. The awakened sentiment in my soul never slumbered again.