The Art of Being Happy / In a Series of Letters from a Father to His Children: with Observations and Comments

by Joseph Droz

It would be to no purpose for me to pause in this place, to obviate the strictures of those who will denounce this doctrine, by quoting from the scriptures the frequent inculcations of the fear of the Lord, and the Apostle’s declaration, that by the terrors of the Lord we persuade men. The true and religious fear, inculcated in the scriptures, not only has no relation to the passion I am discussing, but cannot exist, any more than the other requisite traits of religious character, in a bosom swayed by the grovelling and selfish passion of servile fear.

That nature has implanted in our bosoms an instinctive dread of death, I readily admit. But fear, as a factitious and unnatural addition to the true instincts of human nature, has been so accumulated by rolling down through a hundred generations, that we are in no condition to know the degree, in which nature intended we should possess it. We have innumerable base propensities, which we charge upon nature, that are, in fact, no more, than the guilty heritage, bequeathed us by our ancestors. Nature could have implanted no higher degree of instinctive dread of death, than just what was requisite, to preserve the race from prodigal waste, or rash exposure of a gift, which, once lost, is irretrievable. If nature has inwrought in any constitution one particle of fear, beyond what was required for this result, she has, as in all other excessive endowments, granted reason and judgment, to regulate, and reduce it to its due subordination.

Will not religion achieve the great triumph of casting out the base principle of fear? I would be the last to deny, or undervalue the trophies of true religion. I have no doubt that religion has, in innumerable instances, extracted the pain and poison from the sting of death. More than this, it would unquestionably produce this triumph in every case, if every individual were completely under the influence of the true principle. It would attain this end by processes and discipline exactly concurrent, if not similar, with those I am about to propose. But it is a lamentable fact, that very few are under the influence of true religion. Of those, whom charity deems most sincerely pious, under all professions and forms, the far greater number exhibit, on the bed of dangerous sickness, the same fear of death with the rest. We consider this a generally conceded fact; for, among all but the most extravagant sects, death-bed terror, or triumph has ceased to be considered a test of the personal religion of the deceased. Even in the cases of enthusiastic triumph in the last moments, which we have all witnessed, and which are justly so soothing to the survivors, it would often be difficult to determine the respective influence of laudanum, and partial insanity doing its last work upon the nervous system.

Be this as it may, the triumph over the fear of death, which I would inculcate, should not be tested by the equivocal deportment of the patient, in the near view of death; but by his own joyous consciousness of deliverance from this tormenting thraldom and bondage, during his whole life. Let fear and horror crowd what bitterness they may into the last few hours, it can bear but little proportion to the long agony of a whole life, passed in bondage through fear of death. To produce the desired triumph, the highest training of philosophy should concur with the paternal spirit and the immortal hopes of the gospel; and a calm, reasoning, unboasting fearlessness of death should enable us to taste all the little of pure and innocent joy, that may be found between the cradle and the grave—as unmolested, as unsprinkled with this fear, as if the destroyer were not among the works of God.

How may this result be obtained? How may a generation be so trained as to lose not a particle of enjoyment, nor be influenced to one unworthy act, by the fear of death? To answer these questions, in the requisite detail of illustration, would require volumes. It might, perhaps, best be done by selecting a single child as an example; and by developing, at every advancing step, the process of his training; pointing out every instance, in which it would be necessary to withdraw him from the influence of the present systems of discipline; in which, in a word, his whole education should be conducted with a preponderant purpose, among other desirable results, to render him perfectly fearless of death. It is hoped that some one of those, who believe this a chief desideratum in the reformation and improvement of the present system of education, will take this great point in hand; and in this way indicate to the age the modes of discipline, through which this result may be expected. It is obvious, that a much severer discipline would be required for the first generation so trained, than for the second; who, with less transmitted cowardice than their parents, would perpetuate a constantly improving moral constitution to the generations to come. My present plan admits only a brief summary of motives and arguments, commonly adduced, as calculated to diminish, regulate, and subdue the fear of death. It is evident, that these motives and arguments are predicated upon present opinions, and such as may be supposed capable of acting upon the existing generation, enduring the hereditary and inculcated bondage of this passion.

1. The terrific and undefinable images of horror, that imagination affixes to the term death, are founded in an entire misconception. The word is the sign of no positive idea whatever. It conjures up a shadowy horror to the mind, finely delineated, as a poetic personage, by Milton; and implies some agony that is supposed to lie between the limits of existence and non-existence, or existence in another form. This is simple illusion. So long as we feel, death is not—and when we cease to feel, or commence feeling in a changed form, death has been:—fuit mors. So that the term imports a mere phantom of the imagination. In the words of Droz, ‘it is not yet; or it is past.’ If one can arrest the punctum stans, and the actual sensation, where waking consciousness terminates, and sleep commences, he can tell us, what death is. Every one is conscious of having passed through this change; but no one can give any account, what were his sensations in the dividing moment of interval between wakefulness and sleep.

2. Imagination is allowed to settle all the circumstances, and form all the associations belonging to the supposed agony of this event. It is one of the few important incidents in life, upon which reason is never allowed to fix a calm and severe scrutiny. It has been seen in a light, too sacred and terrible, to permit such a lustration. ‘It is dreadful,’ says common apprehension, ‘for it is the breaking up the long and tender partnership, and producing a separation between the body and the soul—dreadful, because it is the wages of sin, and is appointed to be a perpetual memorial of the righteous displeasure of God in view of sin;’ ‘dreadful,’ say others, who most unphilosophically believe that man was not originally intended to be mortal, ‘because a violence upon nature; dreadful, because a departure of the spirit from the regions of the living, and the light of the sun, into an unknown and eternal condition. Suns will revolve, moons wax and wane, years, revolutions, ages, counted by all the particles of mist in the sea, will elapse, but the place, whence the spirit is gone, will never know it more.’ ‘It is terrible,’ says common apprehension, ‘for it is often preceded and accompanied by spasm, and convulsive struggle.’ The psalmody, which we sing in church, speaks of the ghastly paleness, the chill sweat, and the mortal coldness, circumstances all, which, seen in other associations, would assume no aspect of peculiar terror.

Then, too, the attendants in the sick room with a look of horror inspect the extremities of the patient, and petrify bystanders with the terrible words, ‘he is struck with death,’ as though the grisly phantom king of the poet’s song had invisibly glided in, and, with his icy sceptre, given his victim the blow of mortal destiny. Who knows not that, though there are usually mortal symptoms, which enable an experienced eye to foresee approaching dissolution, the term death-struck imports nothing but the weakest vulgar prejudice, a prejudice under the influence of which millions have been suffered to expire, that might have been roused! Innumerable persons, pronounced to be in that situation, have actually recovered; and no moment, in the ordinary forms of disease, can with any certainty be pronounced beyond hope and the chances of aid, but that which succeeds the last sigh. Thus every thought of the living, and every aspect of the dying, by a wayward ingenuity, heightens the imagined horror of the event.

Then there are conversations and hymns and funeral odes and Night Thoughts, which speak of the coldness, silence and eternal desolation of the grave; as though the unconscious sleeper felt the chill of the superincumbent clay, the darkness of his narrow house or this terrible isolation from the living. The pale and peaceful corpse is contemplated with a look of horror. Two, of stout heart and tried friendship, abide near the kneaded clod, until the living are relieved from their ghostly terrors, by its deposition out of their sight in the narrow house. The family, the children, the friends alike showing the creeping horror, glide quick and silently on tiptoe through the apartment, where the sleeper lies. The first nightfall after the disease is one of peculiar and unmitigated horror. The family, however disinclined to union before, this evening unite, with that impress on their countenances, which words reach not. Now return to their thoughts the nursery tales, the thrilling narratives of haunted houses and wandering ghosts; and if the minister comes among them, it is probably to evoke before their imaginations condemned spirits doomed to eternal sufferings, quenchless flames, groans without respite, and all the ineffable and eternal torments, that the clerical vocabulary of centuries has accumulated.