Having come upon the higher values of personal life which death has forced upon us we can never again, as men, be satisfied with such facts of survival as may come to light through dreams, hallucinations, telepathy and mediums, or in fact through any empirical experiences. Even if the evidence were vastly greater than it is for some form of animistic survival, it would fall far short of our moral and spiritual demands. We already have some intimations in us of “the power of an endless life,” and we seek for a chance to bring it full into play, for the “heavenly period” to “perfect the earthen,” for an ampler life that will reveal what we have all the time meant life to be.
Winifred Kirkland in The New Death well says: “The New Death, i.e., the new view of death, is the perception of our mortal end as the mere portal of an eternal progression and the immediate result is the consecration of all living.... It is a new illumination, a New Death, when dying can be the greatest inspiration of our everyday energy, the strongest impulse toward daily joy.”
II
THE NEW BORN OUT OF THE OLD
Walking across the fields in the spring I found the empty shell of a bird’s egg. The tiny bird that once was in it was lying still and happy under its mother’s wings, or was chirping its new-born song from the limb of a nearby tree, or was trying its new-found wings on the buoyant air. The empty shell was utterly worthless, a mere plaything for the wind. The miracle of life that had stirred within it and had used it for its shelter had gone on and left it deserted. There is a fine proverb which says, “God empties the nest by hatching out the eggs,” and the world is full of this gentle, silent, divine method of abolishing the old by setting free to higher ends all that was true and living in it.
“To-day I saw the dragon-fly
Come from the wells where he did lie.
An inner impulse rent the veil
Of his old husk: from head to tail
Came out clear plates of sapphire mail.
He dried his wings: like gauze they grew;