It is not a matter of reward or of “wages” that concerns us. It is not “happy isles” or care-free “Edens” that we seek, not “golden streets” and endless comfort to make up for the stress and toil of the lean years here below. We want to find the whole of ourselves, we ask the privilege of seeing this fragmentary being of ours unfold into the full expression of its gifts and powers. The new period may be even more strenuous and hazardous than this one has been—still we want the venture. We ask for the culminating acts that will complete the drama, so far only fairly begun. It must be not a mere serial, or straight line, existence; it must be the opening out and expansion of the possibilities which we feel within ourselves—new dimensions, please God.
I am not wrong, I am sure, in claiming that this postulate, this rational faith in the conservation of values, is an asset which death has revealed to the race. The shock of death has always made love appear a greater thing than we knew before the baffling crisis came upon us. It has, too, by the same shock of contrast, awakened man to the full comprehension of the moral sublimity of the good life. Kant maintained that the sense of the sublime is due to the fact that when we are confronted with the supreme powers of nature we then become aware of something unfathomable in ourselves, and feel that we are superior to the might of the storm, or the mountain or the cataract. Nowhere is this truer than when man—man in his full, rich powers—is confronted by death. Instead of cringing in fear, he rises to an unaccustomed height of greatness and is utterly superior to death and aware of some quality of being in himself which death cannot touch. It is just then in that moment of seeming disaster and dissolution that a brave, good man is most triumphant and ready to burn all bridges behind him in his great adventure. Mrs. Browning, all her life an invalid, says about this so-called gigantic enemy: “I cannot look on the earthside of death. When I look deathwards I look over death and upwards.” Her husband, who was “ever a fighter,” has this way of announcing the triumph:
“And then as, ’mid the dark, a gleam
Of yet another morning breaks,
And like the hand which ends a dream,
Death, with the might of his sunbeam,
Touches the flesh and the soul awakes.”[6]
Here is the testimony of a French soldier who writes at a moment when death is close beside him: “I had often known the joy of seeing a spring come like this, but never before had I been given the power of living in every instant. So it is that one wins, without the help of any science, a vague but indisputable intuition of the Absolute.... These are hours of such beauty that he who embraces them knows not what death means.”