DEATH COMPELLING SINCERITY
When the great man comes to the hour of his death, we expect him to be natural, avoiding all sentiments that are forced or incongruous. That is the striking thing about the last words of Sir Walter Raleigh; they were the inevitable and necessary words. Looking down upon his enemies and his friends, Raleigh exclaimed about the executioner’s axe, “It is a sharp medicine, but it is a sure cure of all diseases.” When the sheriff asked if the niche in the block would fit his neck, Raleigh answered, “It matters not how the head lies, if only the heart be right.”—N. D. Hillis.
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DEATH DOES NOT CHANGE CHARACTER
When corn is cut down and is lying on the ground, and is afterward put into the granary, it is the very same corn as had grown up to full maturity in the earth. So also the souls in the granary above are the very same souls as had grown up to maturity in heaven on earth. When they are transferred to heaven above, they are not tares which had been cut down on earth, and which somehow in the process of cutting had been transformed into corn or wheat. Unless wheat will grow up as wheat in the earth, and be harvested as wheat, it will not turn into wheat in the act of cutting, or while it is being removed to the granary.—Alexander Miller, “Heaven and Hell Here.”
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DEATH MADE PLAIN
To Paul Laurence Dunbar the secret of death has already been made plain, of which before he died he wrote as follows:
The smell of the sea in my nostrils,
The sound of the sea in mine ears;