14.
“We find (in the Epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians), every where instilled as the essence of all well-being and well-doing, (without which the wisest public and political constitution is but a lifeless formula, and the highest powers of individual endowment profitless or pernicious,) the spirit of a divine sympathy with the happiness and rights,—with the peculiarities, gifts, graces, and endowments of other minds, which alone, whether in the family or in the Church, can impart unity and effectual working together for good in the communities of men.”
“The Christian religion was, in fact, a charter of freedom to the whole human race.”—Thom’s Discourses on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians.
And this is the true Catholic spirit,—the spirit and the teaching of Paul,—in contradistinction to the Roman Catholic spirit,—the spirit and tendency of Peter, which stands upon forms, which has no respect for individuality except in so far as it can imprison this individuality within a creed, or use it to a purpose.
15.
Dr. Baillie once said that “all his observation of death-beds inclined him to believe that nature intended that we should go out of the world as unconscious as we came into it.” “In all my experience,” he added, “I have not seen one instance in fifty to the contrary.”
Yet even in such a large experience the occurrence of “one instance in fifty to the contrary” would invalidate the assumption that such was the law of nature (or “nature’s intention,” which, if it means any thing, means the same).
The moment in which the spirit meets death is perhaps like the moment in which it is embraced by sleep. It never, I suppose, happened to any one to be conscious of the immediate transition from the waking to the sleeping state.