“The disease that was incipient in me in youth has been bravely baffled by this climate. I sometimes think it is the insidious agent that will ultimately destroy the human race. The end must come, however, even here, and I see that it is coming.
“So tell me what life has taught you about death, if anything. No matter how hard and grim and fearsome the knowledge may be, I want to know it. Strange that although we devote our lives to learning, and many become vain of their acquirements, of this, the most important of all subjects, nobody knows anything, and nobody cares to learn till about to open the dread door.”
This appeal Cartice answered by telling the story of her communion with friends called dead, and she told this with a directness and simplicity that went straight to the mark. To her it was clear enough that, if a man die, he shall live again,—and shall grow, his growth depending upon his aspirations. Genius itself has been described as a “faculty for growth.” Being a citizen of the universe, man is destined to know the universe as his native village. The form only changes. Death is not.
To this Kendall wrote:
“You have destroyed the last enemy for me. ‘Only the form changes.’ Need we dread that? We may even be said to be used to it. We haven’t the same bodies we began life with. They have changed in every particular, again and again.
“How extraordinary have been your privileges of learning those things to which most of us have been so blind. Why not write the story out more fully and publish it? Since it has helped me, might it not help others? But don’t put it into a newspaper. There it would take no higher rank than the traditional, blood-curdling ghost-story. Make a book of it. That will place it on its own feet, to stand or fall by its merits.
“Yes, tell your experiences with those who dwell in what we call another world; in fact, however, another condition.
“I have had an instinctive, though not unwavering belief that this life was not the end of us—perhaps not the beginning; but I had my hours of gloomy doubt. The old twaddle of an eternity of happiness made up of harps and golden streets did not appeal to either my intelligence or taste. Perhaps, it was a shade less attractive than annihilation.
“Learning to grow and to do, that is what makes an immortality worth having.
“I have lived on good terms with my conscience, which is of an old-fashioned cut, not from fear of hell or hope of heaven, but because I am that sort of man. I could not do otherwise. Yet I wish I might have learned what you tell me, earlier. I think it would have made the ills of life here of less moment and might have enhanced its joys and beauties.