Need we wonder, that in a christian country, and among families of the best training, such impressions have become so universal, that they, who would be reputed brave, blazon their courage, by affirming their readiness to sleep in a cemetery, or the funeral vault of a church! It requires no extraordinary effort, and nothing more than the simple triumph of reason among the faculties, to enable any man, to sleep alone in a charnel house with as little dread, as in the apartment of an inn, so that the places were alike in comfort and salubrity. It does not require us to be wise, or courageous; but simply not cowards and fools, to feel as little horror in the view of corpses, as statues of plaster or marble. One of the most terrible ideas of death, after all, is, that we shall thus, immediately upon our decease, inflict this shrinking revulsion of terror upon all, who look at our remains.
The view, which reason takes of the sick and dying bed is, that, in the far greater number of mortal cases, the transition from life to death is as imperceptible, as the progress of the sun and the seasons. One faculty dies after another. The victim has received the three warnings unconsciously. Ordinarily, a person may be said to have paid a third part of his tribute of mortality at forty-five; half at fifty-five; and the whole at three score and ten.
When acute and severe sickness assails the patient, he has passed through what may be called the agony of death at a very early period of his disease. His chief suffering is past, as soon the irritability and the vigorous powers of life have been broken down. When the disorder assumes the typhoid and insensible form, the dull sleep, that precedes the final rest of the tomb, is already creeping upon him; and severe suffering is precluded. If there are convulsions after this, as often happens, they are seldom more than spasmodic movements, impressed by the nervous action upon the tendons, more terrible to the beholder, than the sufferer; differing little from those starts and struggles, with which many persons in high health commence sleeping and waking. He who has experienced the sensation of fainting, and, still more, of an epileptic fit, has suffered, I am ready to believe, all that there is in dying.
3. Reason, calmly surveying the case of the dying person himself, sees many alleviations, of which imagination, sketching under the influence of the dread of death, takes no account. He finds himself, in this new predicament, the absorbing object of all interests and all solicitude and affection. It is not in human nature, that this should not call up complacent emotions and slumbering affections from their secret cells. The subsequent progress towards the last moment brings an imperceptibly increasing insensibility, manifested by drowsiness and sleep. Of those, who preserve the exercise of their faculties entire to the last, many instances are recorded of persons, who had shown the most unmanly dread of death in their health, that have met dissolution with the calmness of perfect self-possession. Of the rest, the greater number die with little more apparent pain and struggle, than accompany the act of sleeping. The greater freshness, vigor and nervous irritability of young people and children cause that most of the exceptions are of this description. In a great number of cases, which I have witnessed, I have paused in doubt, whether the person had yielded his last sigh, or not, after he had actually deceased. To soften the last infliction, nature almost invariably veils it under a low delirium, or absolute unconsciousness.
4. It is impossible to imagine a more obvious and unquestionable principle of philosophy, than that every reasoning faculty of our nature must declare to us, loudly and unequivocally, and with an influence as strong as reason can command, that it is wisdom, nay, the dictate of the least portion of common sense, to dread, to resist, to repine, to groan, as little as possible, in view of an endurance absolutely inevitable. If it be hard to sustain when met with a fearless, resigned and unmurmuring spirit, it must certainly be still harder, when we are obliged to bend our necks to it with the excruciating addition of shrinking fear, dreadful anticipation and ineffectual struggles to evade it, and with murmurs and groans, at finding the inutility of these efforts. Innumerable examples prove to us, that nature has kindly endowed us with reason and mental vigor to such an extent, that, under the influence of right motive and training, no possible form of suffering can be presented, over which this power may not manifest, and has not manifested a complete triumph.
Of these innumerable examples, it is only necessary to cite those of the martyrs, of all forms of religion. These prove farther, that this undaunted self-possession, in every conceivable shape and degree of agony, was not the result of a rare and peculiar temperament, a want of sensibility, or the possession of uncommon physical courage; that it was not because there was no perception of danger, or susceptibility of pain; this magnanimity, this impassibility to fear and pain and death has been exhibited in nearly equal degrees by people of every age, each sex and all conditions. Let the proper motive be supplied, let the martyr have had the common influence of the training of his faith, and the consequence failed not. All the shades and varieties of natural and mental difference of character were noted in the deportment of the sufferers. But they were alike in the stern proof of a courage, which defied death. The fact is proved by them, as strongly as moral fact can be proved, that the mind of every individual might find in itself native self-possession and vigor, to enable it to display an entire ascendency over fear, pain and death.
Nor does this fact rest solely for support on the history of martyrs, or sufferers at an Auto da fé, or by torture in any of its forms. We could find examples of it in every department of history, and every view of human character. The red men of our wilderness, as we have elsewhere seen, are still more astonishing illustrations of this fact—I say astonishing, because the timid and effeminate white man shivers, and scarcely credits his senses, as he sees the young Indian warrior smoking his pipe, singing his songs, boasting of his victories and uttering his menaces, when enveloped in a slow fire, apparently as unmoved, as reckless and unconscious of pain, as if sitting at his ease in his own cabin. All, that has been found necessary, by this strange people, to procure this heroism, is, that the children, from boyhood, should be constantly under a discipline, every part and every step of which tends directly to shame and contempt at the least manifestation of cowardice, in view of any danger, or of a shrinking consciousness of pain in the endurance of any suffering. The males, so trained, never fail to evidence the fruit of their discipline. Sentenced to death, they almost invariably scorn to fly from their sentence, when escape is in their power. If in debt, they desire a reprieve, that they may hunt, until their debts are paid. They then voluntarily return, and surrender themselves to the executioner. Nothing is more common than for a friend to propose to suffer for his friend, a parent for a child, or a child for a parent. When the sufferer receives the blow, there is an unblenching look, which manifests the presence of the same spirit, that smokes with apparent unconcern amidst the crackling flames.
A proof, that this is the fruit of training, and not of native insensibility, as others have thought, and as I formerly thought myself, is that this contempt of pain and death is considered a desirable trait only in the males. To fly, like a woman, like her to laugh, and weep, and groan, are expressions of contempt, which they apply to their enemies with ineffable scorn. The females, almost excluded from witnessing the process of Spartan discipline, by which the males acquire their mental hardihood, partake not of the fruits of it, and with some few exceptions, are shrinking and timid, like the children of civilization.
I know, that there will not be wanting those, who will condemn alike the training and the heroism, as harsh, savage, unfeeling, stoical and unworthy to be admitted, as an adjunct to civilization. But no one will offer to deny, that the primitive Christian, put in conflict with a hungry lion, that Rogers at the Smithfield stake, that the young captive warrior, exulting, and chanting his songs while enduring the bitterest agonies that man can inflict, in the serene and sublime triumph of mind over matter, and spirit over the body, is the most imposing spectacle we can witness, the clearest proof we can contemplate, that we have that within us which is not all of clay, nor all mortal; or doubt, that these persons endure infinitely less physical pain, in consequence of their heroic self-possession, than they would have suffered, had they met their torture in paroxysms of terror, shrinking and self-abandonment.